Group items tagged

"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."

"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

"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

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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."

"Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional - all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps.   "

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

"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."

"Google Apps and Microsoft's Office 365 compete to be the workplace productivity tools of choice. But they are not mutually exclusive as most companies find room for both. A report by cloud identity and mobility management company Okta said that 40% of its customers used Google Apps and Office 365 on a daily basis. According to Okta's 2016 Businesses @ Work report, different departments within a corporate infrastructure are happy to use different parts of the apps for specific tasks such as email or spreadsheets. Around 30% of "overlappers" use Office 365 for Excel, Word and PowerPoint while Google Apps is used for email and inter-office collaborations. Certain industries prefer one to the other, Okta said. Around 82% of financial companies and 77% of biotech firms use Office 365. Google Apps is used by 50% of Internet-centric companies. Office 365 is the dominant force in IT, nonprofit, construction, healthcare and telecommunications. Google Apps is the preferred tool in marketing/advertising and education. Software companies are almost split down the middle-around 27% use both, while Google Apps is used by 38% of companies compared to the 35% who go for Office 365."

"From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."

"Google on Tuesday extended the duration and scope of an aggressive program meant to lure customers to Google Apps from rival cloud-based office productivity products, primarily Microsoft Office 365. The subsidiary of Alphabet introduced in October the incentive, which allowed midsize businesses locked in contracts with other vendors to use Google Apps at no cost until those contracts expired. The offer officially ended April 14. But pleased with its success, Google decided to maintain the incentive until the end of 2016, while also making it easier for smaller companies to qualify, wrote Neil Delaney, sales director for Google Apps for Work, in a company blog."

"he Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) marketplace is ripe for disruption, but probably not via a huge technological breakthrough of some sort. EFSS options are maturing quickly and it's becoming quite commoditized. Consider that, according to Gartner, there are more than 140 vendors in the space - and that's too many. Sixteen of them meet the criteria for Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) for EFSS. That's probably more than the market needs, but it's likely to be a problem that solves itself. Industry Consolidation Monica Basso, Charles Smulders and Jeffrey Mann, who researched and wrote the Gartner report, expect less than 10 percent of today's stand-alone EFSS offerings will exist by 2018. To be frank, not every vendor in the MQ wants to be classified as an EFSS player. Alastair Mitchell of Huddle has told me that he thinks of EFSS as an "albatross" and doesn't want his company to be known for "shuffling files back and forth." More on that in our next article. Gartner defines EFSS as a "range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that enables individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs." The analysts noted that "sharing" can take place between coworkers, suppliers, customers and others, mobile devices and as content exchange between apps. "Security and collaboration support are critical aspects for enterprises to adopt EFSS," they wrote. The Gartner analysts also wrote that beyond standard EFSS functionalities, the vendors they selected might offer additional features around mobility, security, administration and management, back-end server integration via connectors to corporate servers (for example, SharePoint) and cloud services, content manipulation, collaboration and more. Software EFSS products may or may not have one main repository. Some products integrate with existing third-party repositories that are deploy