The margins of cloud products like virtual machines are still in the 50% range. In essence, price drops are going to be a regular feature for the foreseeable future. This begets the question – are hosted solutions becoming irrelevant today?
Boston-based market research firm, 451 Research, has been publishing their ‘Cloud Price Index’ for a few years now. The quarterly study looks into the pricing of various offerings in the cloud market to understand the shifting dynamics in the public, private and hybrid cloud market. According to Dr. Owen Rogers from 451 Research, the approach here is similar to how inflation is calculated – the price of a distributed sample of products from the market are analyzed periodically to ascertain the rise or drop in the prices of the various cloud offerings.
SYS-CON Events announced today that GrapeUp, the leading provider of rapid product development at the speed of business, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Grape Up is a software company, specialized in cloud native application development and professional services related to Cloud Foundry PaaS. With five expert teams that operate in various sectors of the market across the USA and Europe, we work with a variety of customers from emerging startups to Fortune 1000 companies.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Datanami has been named “Media 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.
Datanami is a communication channel dedicated to providing insight, analysis and up-to-the-minute information about emerging trends and solutions in Big Data. The publication sheds light on all cutting-edge technologies including networking, storage and applications, and their effect upon business, industry, government, and research.
As soon as the internet became mainstream, the entire travel and hospitality industry quickly pivoted. No longer did people have to visit a travel agent to plan an extensive vacation.
Today, in order for companies in the travel industry to survive, it’s necessary to recognize these changes and utilize the right technology to engage and convert customers.
CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud service management provider, has announced a $46 million (£35.8m) series D funding round with the company all set to go public.
The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Meritech Capital Partners, and existing investors .406 Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners, taking overall funding to $86m across four rounds.
The company provides a platform that sits on top of other cloud tools, enabling organisations to better understand their cloud costs, whether it is by department, team, application, or business group, and allocate accordingly. Customers include Pinterest, Dow Jones and Imgur.
CloudHealth is clear in its position that the next step from here is towards IPO, although writing in a company blog post, CEO and co-founder Dan Phillips explains how the path to going public is ‘rarely a straight line’.
“Not only are we looking to be part of that elite club [of public Boston technology software companies], but we are also looking to capitalise on a unique set of market conditions and opportunities that have unfolded with the advent of cloud computing,” Phillips wrote.
“Not many companies have the opportunity to be the leader in a disruptive market with exponential growth and become the anchor company at the centre of the Boston software technology ecosystem for decades to come.”
Earlier this year, a report from Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), affirmed that IPOs in the cloud space were drying up, although this was offset by M&A activity going through the roof. Only five companies – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge, and Twilio – went public last year, with this year seeing Cloudera, MuleSoft and Okta all take the plunge.
Could 2018’s first name be provisionally pencilled in therefore? Phillips told CloudTech in a statement that there was ‘no definitive timetable’ at the moment but noted the IPO market ‘is showing some positive signs, so it’s something we’ll continue to watch’.
“At this point we’re focusing more on hitting our short-term goals – continuing to capitalise on the market opportunity we have ahead of us,” he said. “Right now, we’re focusing on scaling our business in every way – expanding our product line, our geographical footprint, our partner portfolio and our talent base. This latest round of funding gives us the ability to continue to execute on our plans.”
«Our strategy is to focus on the hyperscale providers – AWS, Azure, and Google. Over the last year we saw that a lot of developers need to learn how to do their job in the cloud and we see this DevOps movement that we are catering to with our content,» stated Alessandro Fasan, Head of Global Sales at Cloud Academy, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
The cloud ushered in a fundamental change in the way applications are deployed. Instead of worrying about how much dedicated hardware to order for your data center, you simply spin up as many servers as you need to do the job, then decommission them once the job is done. Yet, you still have to plan how many servers you will need at each stage of processing; you still have to remember to decommission them when done; and you pay for the entire virtual machine during the time you use it even though the server may be idle for most of that time.
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Box and Microsoft have announced an expansion to their partnership – with machine learning as part of the potential benefits.
The two companies will align on sales efforts – co-selling Box with Azure, for instance – with the former using the latter as a ‘strategic public cloud platform’.
Yet it is the machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) aspect which leapt out most. The references in the press materials were all shrouded in modal verbs like ‘might’ and ‘could’, but video indexing – using natural language processing to generate metadata and power advanced search – was referenced.
“From leveraging Azure’s footprint of 40 data centres worldwide to help customers keep their data stored in-region, to taking advantage of Azure’s AI technologies – like video recognition – we’re incredibly thrilled to be exploring other innovations for customers,” wrote Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, in a company blog post. “We’ll be working with Microsoft to jointly deliver these solutions, and more, to customers over the coming quarters.”
The initial reference was to Box Zones, a product launched last year which enables in-region data storage, which is currently available in eight countries. Yet as the release puts it, “over time Box intends to leverage Azure’s global footprint to expand Box Zones coverage to many more regions while also giving customers choice and flexibility in local storage options.”
Earlier this month, Box launched Box Drive, which aims to combine “infinite access to the cloud with an intuitive, natively integrated desktop experience that is familiar to hundreds of millions of people today in enterprises all over the world.”
SYS-CON Events announced today that SourceForge has been named “Media 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.
SourceForge is the largest, most trusted destination for Open Source Software development, collaboration, discovery and download on the web serving over 32 million viewers, 150 million downloads and over 460,000 active development projects each and every month.