Alibaba has broken the one million mark for paying customers of its cloud computing business with revenues increasing 96% year over year, according to the company’s latest financial statement.

Revenues from cloud computing totalled RMB 2,431 million (£278m) in the quarter ending June 30, while the total number of customers was 1,011,000, up 15.7% from 874,000 in the previous quarter.

Alibaba clearly defines its cloud computing revenue in its reporting – something of a change to many other cloud providers, as regular readers of this publication will know – and puts its paying cloud customers alongside its active commerce customers. Overall revenue for the company in the latest quarter was RMB 50,184m (£5.7bn), up 56% from this time last year.

Speaking to analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Daniel Zhang, Alibaba chief executive officer, said the firm’s cloud business “continues to enjoy high growth at scale” and that the one million milestone is “merely a starting point.” Maggie Wu, chief financial officer, added: “Our cloud computing business enjoys first mover advantage and we’ll keep expanding our market leadership by continuously providing value-added services.

“Our technology advantage and the team’s strong execution have strengthened our market position as reflected in expanding customer reach spanning many industries, deepening existing customer relationships, and increasing adoption of innovative and value added products by customers,” said Wu.

The company’s cloud push has been long-documented. In 2015, Alibaba announced an additional $1 billion investment in Aliyun – now known as Alibaba Cloud – to expand its international presence. Alibaba has since been busy building out global data centres, announcing plans for Frankfurt, Dubai, Sydney and Tokyo towards the end of last year, and further plans for India and Indonesia in June.

You can read the full Alibaba statement here (pdf).

Read more: How companies can boost their website in China’s clouded market

Photo source: www.alibabagroup.com

The question before companies today is not whether to become intelligent, it’s a question of how and how fast. The key is to adopt and deploy an intelligent application strategy while simultaneously preparing to scale that intelligence.
In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, Sangeeta Chakraborty, Chief Customer Officer at Ayasdi, will provide a tactical framework to become a truly intelligent enterprise, including how to identify the right applications for AI, how to build a Center of Excellence to operationalize the intelligence and how to implement a strategy to scale efforts. She’ll pull from her experience helping tackle HSBC’s anti-laundering threats and identifying genetic susceptibilities of diseases for Mt. Sinai with machine intelligence.

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The Nordics have long been a popular location for data centres – and a new development from Kolos could see the world’s biggest data centre being built in the Arctic Circle.

According to a BBC report, the proposed site, in the Norwegian town of Ballangen, is set to cover 600,000 square miles, or 6.46 million square feet, and stretch across four storeys. The current largest data centre in operation is in Langfang, China, with a size of 6.3m sq ft. The Citadel Campus site in Tahoe Reno, Nevada, is set to be 7.2m sq ft when it becomes fully operational.

The Kolos project has already received ‘several million dollars’ from private investors, the company said, adding it still needed to secure additional funds through working with a US investment bank. Mark Robinson, Kolos co-chief executive, told the BBC the company’s plans also involved tapping into a local university to employ their technology graduates.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the potential the Nordics area has, in no small part due to its colder temperatures and more natural processes for keeping servers chilled. The countries’ governments are also making things easier for companies; in November last year Sweden’s parliament confirmed new legislation giving data centre operators a significantly reduced electricity tax rate, in line with other manufacturing industries.

This publication first reported on the proposed legislation in 2015, with Anne Graf, then investment and development director of Swedish data centre hub The Node Pole, explaining that the proposal was both “just treating data centres the same way as other industries” and “a statement that Sweden is interested in this industry and wants to be a part of it growing.”

One company making the most of this opportunity is Facebook, who already has a site at the Node Pole, in Luleå, Sweden, as well as Odense in Denmark.

The social giant announced earlier this week a budget of $750 million (£583.2m) to spend on a new data centre in Ohio. According to a Firstpost article, Rachel Peterson, Facebook’s director of data centre strategy and development, cited several reasons for the proposed move, including the availability of renewable energy sources.

At the end of July, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved state tax incentives for a project called ‘Sidecat’; the Columbus Dispatch first broke the news that Facebook was the company behind the move last week.

Three significant business technology trends will enable business leaders to thrive over the next five to 10 years. Artificial intelligence (AI), transparently immersive experiences and new digital platforms will provide the foundation that enables organizations to connect with new business ecosystems.

«Enterprise architects who are focused on technology innovation must evaluate these high-level trends and the featured technologies, as well as the potential impact on their businesses,» said Mike J. Walker, research director at Gartner.

In addition to the commercial impact, these trends provide an upside opportunity for enterprise architecture experts to help their senior business leaders respond to digital transformation opportunities by creating actionable plans that guide IT investment decisions.

Digital transformation market development

Artificial intelligence technologies will be the most disruptive trend over the next decade, due to radical computational power, access to vast amounts of data, and advances in deep neural networks. That will enable organizations with AI to harness data, adapt to new situations and solve problems.

Savvy CIOs and CTOs should consider the following technologies: deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, cognitive computing, commercial UAVs (drones), conversational user interfaces, enterprise taxonomy and ontology management, machine learning, smart dust, smart robots and smart workspace.

According to the Gartner assessment, technology will continue to become more human-centric and introduce transparency between people, businesses and things. This relationship will become much more adaptive, contextual and fluid within the workplace.

Digital technologies to be considered include: 4D printing, augmented reality (AR), computer-brain interface, connected home, human augmentation, nanotube electronics, virtual reality (VR) and volumetric displays.

Emerging technologies require revolutionizing the enabling foundations that provide the volume of data needed, advanced compute power, and ubiquity-enabling ecosystems. The shift from IT infrastructure to ecosystem-enabling platforms creates the foundations for entirely new digital business models.

Key platform-enabling technologies to track include: 5G, digital twin, edge computing, blockchain, IoT platform, neuromorphic hardware, quantum computing, serverless PaaS, and software-defined security.

Outlook for digital transformation growth

In summary, these digital technologies make new IT realities possible by providing the underlining platforms that will fuel the future. Gartner believes that technologies such as quantum computing and blockchain are poised to create the most transformative and dramatic impacts in the next five to 10 years.

«These mega-trends illustrate that the more organizations are able to make technology an integral part of employee, partner and customer experiences, the more they will be able to connect their ecosystems to platforms in new and dynamic ways,» said Walker.

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across supply chain networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation’s open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost and time for product recall as well as advance trade. Are you curious about Blockchain and how it can provide you with new opportunities for innovation and growth?
In her session at 20th Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, discussed the basics of Blockchain, and explored real world use cases across a variety of industries.

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In the cloud era, you as an IT professional are being forced to adopt new roles and take on new responsibilities you may not feel equipped to handle. Businesses are becoming increasingly hybrid, leaving you to manage, secure, monitor, and remediate technology on-premises and in the cloud. Of course, this comes with risks because it means you must manage mission-critical layers of application services across networks, systems, and services you neither own nor control. In fact, in many cases, you may not even have visibility into all the environments you’re responsible to ensure the performance of. Indeed, the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017 found that 50 percent of IT professionals surveyed lack control and visibility into their cloud environments.

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Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Connecticut-based Cycle Computing to help provide easier access to high performance computing (HPC) in Azure.

Cycle has been in business since 2005 and provides orchestration software running both off the primary public cloud providers as well as in private cloud environments. Its core tenet is that ‘greater access to compute enables people to ask bigger questions, faster answers and a better world’, in the company’s own words.

According to the company, its products will manage one billion core hours this year, growing 2.7 times every 12 months, and help companies who spend up to $100 million annually on cloud infrastructure.

“We see amazing opportunities in joining forces with Microsoft,” Jason Stowe, Cycle Computing CEO wrote in a blog post. “Its global cloud footprint and unique hybrid offering is built with enterprises in mind, and its Big Compute/HPC team has already delivered pivotal technologies such as InfiniBand and next generation GPUs.

“The Cycle team can’t wait to combine CycleCloud’s technology for managing Linux and Windows compute and data workloads, with Microsoft Azure’s Big Compute infrastructure roadmap and global market reach,” Stowe added.

For Microsoft, the move fits in with its pushes towards artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT) and deep learning, of which it says it has seen ‘explosive’ growth on Azure.

“Cycle Computing will help customers accelerate their movement to the cloud, and make it easy to take advantage of the most performant and compliant infrastructure available in the public cloud today,” added Jason Zander, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure in a blog post.

In 2016, artificial intelligence (AI) reached its climax. Research and advisory firm Tractica predicted that the annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $38.8 billion by 2025. The revenue for enterprise AI applications will increase from $358 million in 2016 to $31.2 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.3%. Thus, IT and business decision makers must face up to the potentials of AI already today. For each kind of organization this leads to the question, which type of technologies or infrastructure they can leverage to operate an AI-ready enterprise stack.

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What sort of WebRTC based applications can we expect to see over the next year and beyond? One way to predict development trends is to see what sorts of applications startups are building. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arin Sime, founder of WebRTC.ventures, discussed the current and likely future trends in WebRTC application development based on real requests for custom applications from real customers, as well as other public sources of information.

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