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"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft's Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. Starting today, Mar. 23, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction we've gotten," he said."

"THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't. THE NEXT STEP The cloud has upended the enterprise storage market, but that isn't its competitive advantage. Local scale-out storage can be competitive with cloud because network bandwidth isn't cheap. What the cloud has that no enterprise-scale datacenter will ever have is the ability to spin up 10s of thousands CPUs - a virtual supercomputer - to run analytics against the data. CPUs are expensive - and they'll remain so as long as Intel can keep them that way. The ready access to massive CPU cycles means that cloud will always be better at deep analytics, especially ad-hoc queries, than enterprise scale datacenters. But more importantly, cloud-based machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence are the next major evolution in how we use data. And that's where Google has a huge lead over Amazon. Amazon's focus on building cloud-based datacenters makes them irresistable now, but the future of the cloud is with applications that can use thousands of cores to create value. Look at what Google - and Microsoft - has done with machine translation. Yes, you need many petabytes of storage for the corpus, but the real key is in the compute resources and algorit

"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple Inc. last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Corp.'s Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. This week, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, starting Wednesday in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Searching for a cloud coup Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction

" Netflix worked with Google to create a software program called Spinnaker, which allows companies to easily use Google's cloud, as well as Amazon's and Microsoft's. Netflix made Spinnaker available as a free and open-source project in November so anyone else can use it or contribute to it, and ideally, help Netflix maintain it. And Spinnaker is the topic of the talk that will be given by Netflix engineer Andrew Glover. Spinnaker allows a company to use multiple clouds, like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, at the same time.  While Netflix is currently only using Spinnaker with its cloud provider of choice, Amazon, Wired reports, the threat is not subtle. Netflix isn't stuck with Amazon. Nor is anyone else that uses the tool.  Google Diane Greene Google needs to showcase big enterprise customers and offer them ways to easily try its cloud if it hopes to be a major presence in cloud computing."

"The combination of familiar software and enterprise-class support is bringing early adopters disappointed by Google's lack of progress back to Microsoft."

"Research firm Gartner's annual report card on the public IaaS cloud computing market shows there is one clear leader - Amazon Web Services - and another clear challenger - Microsoft Azure. And then there is everyone else. "The market is dominated by only a few global providers - most notably Amazon Web Services, but increasingly also Microsoft Azure," Gartner researchers say, giving Google Cloud Platform an honorable mention. "Between them, these three providers comprise the majority of workloads running in public cloud IaaS in 2015.""

"Google is looking to strategically tackle the enterprise cloud market by open sourcing some of its internal technologies, embracing a multiplatform design principle and setting what it thinks are reasonable expectations for what its customers should move into the public cloud. The company hopes to continue making strides in the crowded market, which Amazon dominates, by helping enterprises identify business processes that can rapidly transition to the cloud and deliver the fastest ROI. Download the March 2016 digital issue Inside: What you need to know about staffing up for IoT, how cloud and SDN set Veritas free & much more! READ NOW Now that companies can store all the data they want in the cloud for as little as $0.01 per GB per month, figuring out what to do with it all is a significant challenge, according to Greg DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) director of product management, who spoke with CIO.com at the GCP user conference last week. "It's the needle in the haystack," DeMichillie says. "Companies are drowning in data that they know, or that they suspect, there's value in ... but they don't know how to get the value out of it.""

"Although Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) still maintains its lead in the public cloud space, Microsoft's Azure platform may be turning the tide in larger enterprises. A new survey lends credence to that perception. The survey comes vio Sumo Logic, examining "The New Normal: Cloud, DevOps, and SaaS Analytics Tools Reign in The Modern App Era." Sumo Logic, which describes itself as a "machine data analytics service," contracted UBM to survey 235 IT operations, application development, and information security professionals at companies with at least 500 employees, with about half of the respondents working at companies with 5,000 or more employees. At that high end of the enterprise spectrum, the survey found, Azure actually beats AWS. "In the early days of the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) took the lead as the cloud computing vendor of choice," the survey report said. "But the survey revealed that as the cloud matures, organizations are becoming more comfortable with vendors other than AWS and are using multiple cloud vendors. In fact, while other reports show that AWS still has a lead in cloud market share, the top cloud vendor in this survey -- which included only organizations with at least 500 employees -- was Microsoft Azure. [Click on image for larger view.] IaaS and PaaS Vendors (source: Sumo Logic) "When asked which IaaS or PaaS vendors they were using (with multiple responses allowed), 66 percent of respondents cited Azure. Interestingly, more than half of the Azure users were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft's cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises. AWS came in second with 55 percent of respondents, followed by Salesforce App Cloud (28 percent), IBM Cloud (23 percent), and Google Cloud (20 percent).""

"Microsoft's Office 365 is winning the hearts and minds of the workplace, overtaking Google Apps as the preferred productivity tool by an increasing number of business enterprises, a recent report says. According to the second annual Cloud Adoption Report conducted by cloud access security broker Bitglass-subtitled Episode II: Attack of the Clouds and bizarrely using Star Wars as a recurring theme-Office 365 has trebled its user adoption rate in the space of a year from 7.7% in 2014 to 25.2%. Over 34% of organizations with between 500 and 1,000 employees use the Microsoft tool, as opposed to 21.9% who work with Google Apps For Work, an indicator that the authors of the report say confirms that cloud applications are now a significant player. Following a survey of almost 120,000 global companies-both small and enterprise level-the report said that there had been a rise of 20% from last year in the number of businesses that employed a cloud application as their prime productivity tool. In 2014, 28% of respondents used the cloud with that figure increasing to 48% 12 months later. Granted, the sample size had also risen from 80,000 in the first survey, but the results bear out a perception that cloud-based solutions will become the norm."

"Highly Available Cold Storage A low-cost, highly-durable and highly available storage service for infrequently accessed data, data archiving, online backup and disaster recovery. Data is available instantly, not within hours or days. With sub-second average response times and 1 cent per GB/month pricing, Cloud Storage Nearline gives you terrific performance at a low cost. Fast, Anytime Access With Cloud Storage Nearline, you get all the benefits of cold storage while your data is immediately available. Store limitless data and get access rapidly through Google Cloud Platform Storage APIs with sub-second response times for data retrieval and 99% availability SLA. Affordable pricing Cloud Storage Nearline provides the TCO benefits usually associated with offline storage, so you can easily backup and store a virtually limitless amount of data. Capacity pricing is just 1 cent per GB/month for data at rest and 1 cent per GB for data retrieval. Switch & Save Get a headstart and reduce the costs of your migration to Google Cloud Storage Nearline by receiving 100PB of free storage1 in Cloud Storage Nearline for up to 6 months. Partnerships & Integrations Leading disaster recovery, backup and hybrid cloud storage providers such as Unitrends, Actifio, Pixit Media, EMC, Commvault and Egnyte have integrated with Cloud Storage Nearline to make adopting Cloud Storage Nearline a seamless experience. Numerous other companies are also available to help you take a new approach to data storage in your own environment."

"Latest Synergy Research data shows Microsoft lapping at Cisco's heels in the overall collaboration market, and well ahead in the hosted/cloud segment. A couple of primary tussles characterize the collaboration decision today: Cisco vs. Microsoft, and cloud vs. premises. So it behooves us to ask, then: What impact might we expect Microsoft's big push into the cloud, a la Skype for Business and Office 365, to have on each of these critical enterprise decision points? Will Microsoft push ahead of Cisco as it makes cloud the center of its collaboration universe? And will its Skype for Business/Office 365/voice story make the cloud an easier choice for enterprise communications professionals trying to determine whether to ditch a premises installation? This is certainly one way to think about the latest collaboration market data from Synergy Research Group, released this week for first-quarter 2015. The Synergy research shows Microsoft trailing Cisco ever so slightly in the total collaboration market, but well ahead of its chief competitor in hosted/cloud collaboration, as displayed in the graphic below. "

"Cloud-based platforms such as Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365 are far from ubiquitous in today's workplace, but they're seeing rapid adoption, and that trend is going to continue. In fact, more than half of the small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) queried as part of a new survey from BetterCloud plan to run all of their IT services in the cloud within five years. State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the READ NOW The corporate adoption rate of complete IT-in-the-cloud infrastructure will more than double during the next two years, according to the 1,500 IT professionals surveyed. Today only 12 percent of the respondents run all of their IT in the cloud, but that number will increase to 26 percent by 2017 and nearly 70 percent by 2025, according to BetterCloud, which sells IT administrative tools for both Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365."

"Amazon has built a multibillion-dollar business in AWS, while Google is far behind. But the cloud is a rapidly evolving beast, and Amazon's advantages are about to be turned against them. THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't."

Aug 4, 2016 at 18:30 GMT Everyone knows that Amazon is the current leader in the cloud infrastructure market by a huge margin. But it is not just about cloud infrastructure (IaaS), enterprises need SaaS, PaaS, and several others for a complete solution. Microsoft today highlighted that they are the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner's Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads. Microsoft is in a unique position with their extensive portfolio of cloud offerings designed for the needs of enterprises, including Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Office 365, CRM Online and Power BI and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). And Microsoft's cloud vision is a unified story that we're executing on with the same datacenter regions, compliance commitments, operational model, billing, support and more. The ability to deploy and use applications close to data with consistent identity and a shared ecosystem, means greater efficiency, less complexity, and cost savings. Take a look at the table on the top, Microsoft is a Leader in almost 18 different cloud solution categories while Amazon is a leader in only three of them and Google in none."

"Google operates one of the world's biggest networks of computers. But its business of renting time on those computers to others-a concept known as cloud computing-lags far behind Amazon.com Inc. and others."

"As a means of measuring for how technology is being adopted in the marketplace, the most common metaphor is usually war. Companies are always involved in battles for consumers, new products are launched at strategic dates in the calendar and there is often an overwhelming sense that victory must be achieved at any cost. In the software sector battlefields are vast, ongoing and filled with casualties. More often than not, the definition of who has won and who has lost is blurred-victory is defined by market share and by how and by whom the technology is being used. In the last decade, there has been a war in the workplace, especially when it comes to the integration of the cloud into daily working and collaboration practices. Both Microsoft and Google want to be the dominant players in the arena, but it appears that neither side can currently claim total victory."

"There's no question Amazon is turning the screws on the $140 billion data-center-tech industry. Amazon has grown to become the largest player in the rapidly growing cloud industry as its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), celebrates its 10-year anniversary.  And in the process, AWS has sent shockwaves through the traditional enterprise sector. In an interview with Business Insider, Werner Vogels - the CTO of Amazon in charge of AWS - explained why hardware companies aren't going to get any respite any time soon. Hardware builders are getting squeezed out the game Right now, instead of buying all of their own computers, networks, and software, businesses large and small are opting to rent it all from cloud-computing vendors. That spells bad news for companies like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, the hardware makers selling companies the servers, storage, and management software."

"Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica

"Google is going after the cloud computing market in a big way. The company invested nearly $10 billion of capital expenditures to build its cloud business in 2015 alone, new cloud leader Diane Greene said during her keynote speech on Wednesday at Google's cloud tech conference in San Francisco."

"Venture capital (VC) firms will go to great lengths to convince the most promising tech founders to accept their deals so they can get their hands on that all-important slice of equity. Some of them will offer introductions to important people in their network, while others will offer hardcore engineering support and a cool place to work. The very best advice, swanky dinners, and even the odd CEO retreat are also up for grabs if you sign a term sheet with us, they might say. But Vineet Jain, CEO and cofounder of cloud storage firm Egnyte, which has raised $62 million (£43 million), believes many VCs overpromise. Speaking to Business Insider by phone on Tuesday, Jain said: "Most VC firms say we give you more than money. That's complete hogwash." Egnyte, which competes with Box and Dropbox, has been backed by Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google, and Kleiner Perkins, a well-known Silicon Valley investor with billions at its disposal. Jain, whose company is based over the road from Google in Mountain View, was quick to say that Google Ventures is unlike many other venture capital companies. "They were instrumental to us," he said, adding that the firm helped Egnyte to improve its web user interface and assisted with the company's marketing efforts. Egnyte has also integrated its cloud storage platform - used by 15,000 companies - with Google's own cloud platform, Google Drive. Unlike Box and Dropbox, who have raised $558 million (£385 million) and $1.1 billion (£760 million) respectively, Egnyte is on target to be cash flow positive by the third quarter of this year. "I refused to have a free version of Egnyte," said Jain. "Look at where I am today.""