The analysts at Cloud Spectator have been assessing the best cloud vendors in Europe for price and performance, with French hosting provider OVH replacing 1&1 at the top of the rankings.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of Cloud Spectator’s shtick. The company analyses vCPU, memory, and block storage performance, and puts it alongside pricing to give an overall verdict. As a rule, the hypervendors – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, and IBM – often struggle.

In this analysis, with OVH given the benchmark default total of 100 out of 100, IBM SoftLayer finished dead last on 18, with AWS (23) and Azure (29) faring little better. Google, with a score of 61, was the best performing of the major vendors, although in fourth place overall, behind Rackspace.

Testing on the cloud providers – which also numbered DigitalOcean, CenturyLink and Dimension Data – took place in February and March, with more than one million data points collected. While 1&1, previously the leader in such tests, demonstrated the best combination of performance and high stability, OVH took the overall crown due to ‘strong VM performance and the most inexpensive packaged pricing found in the study for the majority of VM sizes’.

Previous research in February, which focused on the US infrastructure as a service space, warned enterprises were at risk of ‘significant’ overspend on cloud services. As with the European perspective, Google performed better than AWS, Azure and SoftLayer, but scoring only 48 with 1&1 as the leader.

“When making cloud purchase decisions, performance is a critical yet often overlooked component of the cloud, but can have a substantial impact on annual operating costs,” said Kenny Li, CEO of Cloud Spectator. “We have found no correlation between price and performance across the 10 providers included in this report.

“It is apparent that with the public cloud, you don’t always get what you pay for.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).

More than nine in 10 UK CIOs and IT decision makers polled by Trustmarque say they plan to migrate their on-premise apps to infrastructure, platform, and software as a service clouds within five years.

The study, which took the opinions of 200 CIOs and senior IT decision makers from enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, also found that public sector CIOs were more likely to move quickly compared to their private sector counterparts.

Not surprisingly, cost saving was the biggest benefit according to the respondents, cited by 61%, alongside scalability (60%), and improving their business ability to deliver projects and new requirements (51%).

Almost half (49%) said that retiring existing infrastructure was the primary driver of cloud migration, with more than half of CIOs saying the complexity of their existing infrastructure is slowing down their plans.

“CIOs and IT decision makers do clearly appreciate the benefits for their businesses from effective migration. However, many are wary of the potential pitfalls and challenges,” said James Butler, CTO of Trustmarque.

“Cloud-based models of IT delivery have a wide range of benefits that cannot be fully unlocked without transforming the architectural and IT organisation, which is never trivial,” he added. “Simple lift and shift projects are not enough to do that and may struggle to achieve a good return on investment.

“It’s vital customers put in place both the underpinning foundations for the new controls and operating models that are common across clouds, along with a holistic strategy that covers new innovation as well as the pre-existing IT estate.

“With those in place they can safely build and deliver the application roadmaps to move to the cloud.”  

Trustmarque has frequently gathered CIO opinion on cloud adoption. In January, a report found that more than half (55%) of UK CIOs saw out of date capex models as the reason for slowing down their adoption of cloud services.

SYS-CON Events announced today that T-Mobile will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. As America’s Un-carrier, T-Mobile US, Inc., is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. The Company’s advanced nationwide 4G LTE network delivers outstanding wireless experiences to 67.4 million customers who are unwilling to compromise on quality and value.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that DivvyCloud will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
DivvyCloud software enables organizations to achieve their cloud computing goals by simplifying and automating security, compliance and cost optimization of public and private cloud infrastructure. Using DivvyCloud, customers can leverage programmatic Bots to identify and remediate common cloud problems in real time. DivvyCloud was founded by seasoned technologists who understand first-hand what is necessary to succeed in today’s fast-changing, multi-cloud world.

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Everywhere we turn in our industry we can find strong opinions about the direction, type and nature of cloud’s impact on computing and business. Another word that is used in every context in our industry is “hybrid.”
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Alvaro Gonzalez, Director of Technical, Partner and Field Marketing at Peak 10, will use a combination of a few conceptual props and some research recently commissioned by Peak 10 to offer a real-world consideration of how the various categories of cloud can be relevant to your business.

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20th Cloud Expo, taking place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday’s debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.

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Newgen Software Inc., a leading global provider of banking software solutions today announced its participation at Texas Bankers Association’s 133rd Annual Convention at Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, San Antonio, Texas from May 10-12, 2017. Newgen will be present at booth #524 in the exhibit area to engage with bankers and showcase its smart banking solutions that can transform their customer experience and improve compliance adherence. Newgen’s unified configurable solutions seamlessly integrate with core banking systems and other applications for processing all loan types including commercial and retail loans, commercial and institutional loans (C&I), commercial real estate loans (CRE) and small business administration (SBA) loan. The solutions also cater to online account opening and trade finance requirements.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that EARP Integration will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. EARP Integration is a passionate software house. Since its inception in 2009 the company successfully delivers smart solutions for cities and factories that start their digital transformation. EARP provides bespoke solutions like, for example, advanced enterprise portals, business intelligence systems and mobile applications for international enterprises across different sectors such as Energy and Utilities, GreenTech, MedTech, FinTech, Facility Management and Housing, Automotive Manufacturing, and Sport. EARP also cooperates with international software houses by providing them with highly qualified and well-selected, multilingual teams for bigger projects.

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The latest analysis of the global cloud infrastructure market from Canalys plays into the trends watchers of the industry have seen for some time: Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate but is growing more slowly than its nearest rivals.

AWS’ growth is still at 43% year over year according to Canalys, while Microsoft continues to be the quickest growing of the hypervendors at 93% growth. Google was up 74% year on year, while IBM held 38% growth. The result is that AWS holds a ‘stable’ market share of 31%.

“Competition for enterprise customers is intensifying among leading cloud service providers, which are investing heavily to secure key national and global accounts,” said Daniel Liu, Canalys research analyst.

“Timing is crucial, as many large accounts are assessing, formulating and executing strategies to move existing workloads and infrastructure to the cloud, and develop new types of workloads as part of digital transformation initiatives.”

The findings mirror similar analysis from Synergy Research on cloud infrastructure. Back in August, the company argued that AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google owned more than half of the cloud infrastructure market between them – but they were also growing quicker than the overall market.

Canalys also cites the channel as an opportunity for vendors to grow further and differentiate. “Go-to-market strategy, including both customer and channel partner engagement, will ultimately determine vendor success in this segment,” added Canalys senior analyst Jordan De Leon. “Larger enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy to distribute risk.

“Ultimately, to challenge AWS, vendors will need deep financial resources to continue to participate and advance.”

Canalys says the overall cloud infrastructure services market hit $11.4 billion in Q117.