Cloud Productivity Platform Wars

Chart comparisons detailing the success of Amazon and Microsoft in the Cloud, and the decline of Oracle and IBM regarding IT future Spending.

"It's not easy tracking the girth of public cloud providers amid run rates, as-a-service sales projections, and a lack of transparency. Here's how AWS stacks up against Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google, and Oracle." Good comparison with stats

"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).""

"Amazon Web Services reported $3.536 billion in revenues during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, which put its annual cloud revenue run rate at above $14 billion. Since Amazon (AMZN) has a negligible presence in the software-as-a-service segment, most of that revenue is coming from the infrastructure-as-a-service segment, which continues to grow at double-digit rates."

"I happened to be looking through the settings of Google's Docs app for Android the other day when I spotted something interesting -- something I'd never before noticed. Sitting amidst all of the app's everyday options is a quietly significant feature, disabled by default: the ability to create standard Word documents within the app with a single tap -- to start a file that's in the DOCX format from the get-go, in other words, rather than in Google's own proprietary format. Huh. How 'bout that?"

"eady a major player in enterprise file sharing and hosting, Dropbox is launching a public version of its new Paper service to make a name for itself among collaborative productivity suite providers such as Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365. Paper, which has been available in beta since last year, is aiming to win converts from the big names in the space with a user interface that the company said makes collaboration between coworkers easier. The cloud-based platform will allow users to manage shared documents by assigning different tasks and deadlines to various collaborators. Making Collaboration Easier The service also includes a variety of features designed to make collaboration between team members easier, no matter where in the world they're located. A Paper app is coming to iOS and Android devices to enable users to work on documents even while offline. The Web interface, meanwhile, is currently available in 21 languages, an important feature for multi-lingual teams. These new capabilities join other recent additions such as presentation mode, a feature that turns documents into presentation slides and integration with Google Calendar to make it easier for teams to create and share notes. Paper has already reached early enterprise adopters such as InVision, Ben & Jerry's, Shopify, Campaign Monitor, Getaround and Patreon, according to Dropbox. But the company appears to be positioning Paper to steal market share away from Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. New Business Plans Going head-to-head with such well-established players will likely be a tall order. To help make Paper more attractive to its enterprise clients, Dropbox is also making its file hosting environment more enterprise-friendly. The latest version of the Web interface, which was released in conjunction with Paper, is more streamlined and potentially easier to navigate. Dropbox has also introduced a new feature that allows users to see others on their teams who have viewed their s

"Mostly As: Use an existing framework If timelines are tight and a distinct style is not your priority, then an existing framework is the way to go! If you want to get up and running as quickly as possible, try Bootstrap. For a responsive site with a clean, minimal style, try Foundation. If you're building a more granular UI with some constraints, go for BassCSS. All three are robust and well-documented - you'll have a UI together in no time. Mostly B: Build your own Sounds like your project needs its own standardised, documented styles. Congratulations! You've now got a real project on your hands. Try looking at existing frameworks and building off their best practices. Think of your framework from an outside perspective. Would your team use it if they didn't have to? Solid works for BuzzFeed because it's simply easier to develop with than without it (to read more about Solid and how we got started, check out our post on Medium). Building your own tool is not easy. But persevere and some day you'll be writing cheeky quizzes in a magazine."

Excellent article described the different ways web sites and user information can be hacked. "Website hacking is nothing new, but the techniques of a hacker are in constant flux. In an attempt to keep up with this ever-evolving digital dark art, the US government alone spent a whopping $14 billion on cyber security in 2016 - a year that will go down in hacking history."

"THE VALUE OF bitcoin surged past $1,000 this week, the first time it has reached such heights since late 2013. But don't let that big number fool you: this strange and controversial technology is no closer to becoming a mainstream currency. Even Olaf Carlson-Wee, the first employee at Coinbase, the country's most important bitcoin company, will tell you that bitcoin will never be a substitute for the dollar. "It was a big mistake that any of this was ever compared to currency," Carlson-Wee says."

"PDF is the most popular type of document format that has use in technical areas, schematics, white paper, brochures and a whole lot of documents to numerous to mention. Unfortunately, some PDF documents may need to be edited to get to the standard required. Even though, there are many ways to edit PDFs to get what you want. For example, it is possible to edit PDF text online with numerous online solutions, however, the disadvantages of using this method outweighs its advantages. There is a reliable way of editing PDF files and that is by using Wondershare PDFelement."

"Samsung on Wednesday announced its intentions to support early-stage startups focused on emerging technologies. The company, through its global innovation group, has established a $150 million fund targeting businesses specializing in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and "other new frontier technologies." So far, Samsung has made investments in 10 startups: Converge Industries, Dashbot, Entry Point VR, Filament, Intezer, LiquidSky, Otto Radio, 2Sens, SafeDK, and Virtru. The fund is aimed at making pre-seed to series B investments. "Our investments bring the power of the Samsung platform to startups to accelerate their growth and ultimately their success," said Brendon Kim, vice president and the managing director of Samsung's Next Ventures. "The Samsung NEXT Fund expands our global reach and capabilities, while increasing Samsung's access to more great ideas, products and talent." Samsung declined to specify how much each startup receives. In addition, it appears that the company could be targeting those in Israel next, with the opening of a new office in Tel Aviv, Israel in September. There are now five offices worldwide dedicated to innovation, including San Francisco, Mountain View, Korea, and New York. More locations are planned later this year. Samsung Next formerly was known as the Global Innovation Center. The name change was done because "our new name reflects our passion for partnering with tech innovators to take them to the NEXT level - build great ideas into products, grow products into thriving businesses and scale businesses that leverage and transform the Samsung ecosystem.""

"But Microsoft is way ahead of Oracle when it comes to the IaaS segment with Microsoft Azure growing at triple-digit speeds for the last several quarters. Oracle's IaaS segment grew only 6% during the latest quarter, a growth rate that exemplifies its weak position in the strongly growing IaaS market. As Office 365 keeps marching onward and upward, Microsoft is gaining an even stronger foothold in the enterprise segment. Its IaaS offering is as good as any other company out there in the segment, something that is also validated by the strong growth numbers it has been reporting in the last two years. As Microsoft keeps expanding its business management software portfolio that includes CRM and ERP, the company will be in a unique position with strong cloud offerings in SaaS-PaaS-IaaS segments that will be unmatchable by its competition. Companies will naturally gravitate toward a single vendor that can take care of several workflows instead of going through the headache of handling multiple vendors and worrying about integrating all of them to work seamlessly. With Microsoft, that won't be a problem, and that's something Nadella is consciously crafting out of the company's many disparate products. But don't get me wrong. The need for multiple SaaS vendors will always be there. Different businesses have different needs, and there will be times when only a niche player would be able to adequately address those needs. But when you have a company that can take care of the majority of the workflows as well as workloads, like Microsoft can, you'd rather keep Microsoft to handle all the heavy lifting while throwing in a few more SaaS companies to address the entirety of your technology needs. There won't be a need to have Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) manage your customer relationships, Oracle handle your enterprise resource planning, Microsoft handle your office productivity suite and Amazon handle your infrastructure. All you need is a few clicks on your Microsoft

"Vas Natarajan, partner at Accel: "I wonder if we'll look back at 2016 as the year Microsoft laid the tracks for a huge victory in the cloud wars. There's a major flank happening here in bits and pieces - and many of those pieces began to fit together this year: Office 365 becoming the de facto cloud productivity package for enterprise workers; The acquisition of LinkedIn as a foundational data asset for a pending assault in sales and marketing SaaS; Azure becoming a credible, cost effective IaaS/developer platform with meaningful enterprise sales/support/solutions; MSFT's accelerating support of open platforms & open source; Continued investment in the oft-dismissed .NET developer crowd with their Xamarin purchase; and Fervent, organizational-wide support of Satya and his vision for serving a mobile, cloud, data-enabled world. This doesn't even consider the massive incumbency advantages MSFT already has given their years of selling to the enterprise." "

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Hey David! The horses have left the barn. Unlike the last great platform transition, the move to the Cloud involves moving billion and billions of existing data bits and documents. Much of this content (data + documents) is valuable "in-process" information vital to the current operations of legacy business systems. The last time there was a platform shift it was from the Mainframe-workstation era to the PC client-server era. Digital information was in its infancy. Today the volumes of digital business information is enormous. Meaning, the horses have already left the barn. The lock-in is set. Volumes of document content is locked into Microsoft Office applications, and can only be "worked" by either Microsoft Office, or Office 365. No business is going to move their systems to the Cloud and leve these billions of "in-process" documents behind. Another aspect to consider is the productivity equation which says that collaboration = the integration of communications and content (data + documents). ALL THREE must be integrated!!! Meaning if Microsoft apps have billions of documents locked up, an enterprise cannot make a decision based on best communications or data integration. They must choose Microsoft's Cloud where all THREE aspects can be integrated. This is the hook that has made Office 365 the most successful Cloud mover ever (85 million subscribers with an annual run rate of $13.5 billion - and all this after only two years in the marketplace) Quote: "The majority of IT decision-makers believe that vendor lock-in prevents their companies from maximizing the business value of public cloud. IT leadership often chooses not to move applications to the public cloud because they believe investing in just one cloud provider will hinder flexibility. Several studies reinforce this conclusion, stating that the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players, like AWS, is negative for the industry. Even when using core services, such as Amazon Elast

"One of my key focuses when working with clients rolling out Office 365 starts from breaking down the complexity that is Office 365 into bite size easy to consume programs of work.  Usually there is a groan when I show them my Infographic as they aren't aware of the complexity that can come with rolling out Office 365 to users.  I didn't create the Infographic to scare them, I did it to get them to actually focus on the bigger picture and rich features that come with Office 365. Once they grasp this we can then focus on how they can collaborate, communicate etc and break it down into great user scenarios to digitally transform the way they work.  Just 'turning it on' won't work! " Great O365 Graphic demonstrating what the Microsoft Cloud Strategy is all about.

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"With almost every sector of the economy facing a digital transformation, businesses must find new ways to get their information and data online. No longer does it make sense to have documents stored on paper. To keep up with the ever-changing times, more and more businesses are turning to the Portable Document Format (PDF). "Due to proliferation of new platforms, devices, and technologies, providing a quality PDF solution is more challenging than ever before," said Catherine Andersz, director of PDFTron. "So far the PDF format stood the test of time, but it's facing challenges due to fragmentation and poor implementations of the standard as well as relevance in the new world of small devices." The biggest benefits to moving to PDFs are that businesses can guarantee their documents will be accessible, viewable, and printable by everyone at any time, according to Gerald Holmann, founder and president of Qoppa Software. Today, PDF viewers are available across browsers, operating systems and applications, making it ubiquitous, according to Matt Kuznicki, CTO of Datalogics. However, as more users take interest in the technology, there will be a wider range of industries that PDFs have to address. "The PDF format contains a huge set of features and functionality designed for different audiences, and understanding the needs and capabilities of different workflows is now more important than ever," he said. PDF 2.0… The PDF file format was once a proprietary format owned by Adobe systems. Today, it is an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The last version of the PDF standard Adobe put out was version 1.7. As part of PDF 1.7, Adobe added supplementals incorporating features that came out after the release. Since the standard was handed over to ISO, the organization has been working to integrate those features into the upcoming main standard, PDF 2.0. Notable features include redaction annotations and

"The Best jQuery Plugins Bellow, you'll find a list of free awesome jQuery plugins. And because our readers are what makes Designmodo great, we've carefully selected plugins that are actively maintained or, at least, have been updated in the past year. While I've used most of them in projects, there are some terra-incognita plugins that I am excited to test and implement. You'll find some fancy galleries, awesome animations but also some functional components. Finally, I hope that this list will prove to be useful, and I am looking forward to seeing how you'll implement them. Let us know in the comment section or tag us on Twitter @Designmodo."

"What is Firepad? Firepad is an open source real-time collaborative text editor. It provides true collaborative editing, complete with intelligent operational transform-based merging and conflict resolution. Some features include: Cursor position synchronization Undo & redo Text highlighting User attribution Presence detection Version checkpointing What can I do with Firepad? You can build any application that requires collaborative editing of text documents. Firepad supports both rich text and code editing out-of-the-box, and it's easy to extend for other use cases. How is Firepad different than other collaborative text editors? Most collaborative text editors require special code to run on a server, making them impractical to use if you're not already using the right server stack. Firepad has no server dependencies and instead relies on the Firebase Realtime Database for real-time data synchronization. This means that it's easy to add Firepad to any application, even static websites. All you need to do is drop in the JavaScript files and go."