It has been a busy couple of weeks for storage provider Cloudian. The company has announced $125 million (£90.7m) in funding, a short time after its most recent product release.

The funding round is being made alongside Digital Alpha Capital, a private equity firm focused on software as a service (SaaS) and eCommerce providers, with $100 million going on ‘consumption-model financing’ – or debt financing, as it is recorded in...

Hyperscale cloud and data centre operators spent $22 billion on capital expenditure (capex) in the final quarter of 2017 making the total for the year almost $75bn, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook comprise the top five spenders of the 24 major cloud and internet service firms analysed in Q417, according to the data, with growth ‘particularly strong’ at Amazon and Facebook. Alibaba, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Tencent made up the top...

• Machine learning patents grew at a 34% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2013 and 2017, the third-fastest growing category of all patents granted
• International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that spending on AI and ML will grow from $12bn in 2017 to $57.6bn by 2021
• Deloitte Global predicts the number of machine learning pilots and implementations will double in 2018 compared to 2017, and double again by 2020

These and many other fascinating insights are from the latest series of machine learning market forecasts, market estimates, and...

Storage provider Cloudian says it has achieved record growth for the third year in a row, with revenues up in every geographic segment and particular expansion in Europe.

The company’s results ‘point to the exploding need for scale-out storage solutions in an era when artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, high-resolution video and other data-intensive applications require businesses to manage data that is growing at an unprecedented rate’, in Cloudian’s own words.

Cloudian...

Enterprise cloud spend is on the up while Microsoft Azure gains ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to the latest RightScale State of the Cloud report.

The study, which polled almost 1,000 respondents, found that Azure enterprise adoption was at 58%, gaining around on AWS with 68%. For organisations who have just begun their cloud journeys (below), Azure leads AWS, in 49% and 47% implementation respectively.

An interesting series of findings from ISACA in its latest report: almost one in three organisations polled are not calculating return on investment in their cloud computing initiatives.

The findings, which appear in a report titled ‘How Enterprises Are Calculating Cloud ROI – And Why Some Enterprises Are Moving Ahead Without It’, reveal how companies are increasingly moving away from the ROI model. “If ROI is not calculated in advance of implementation, it becomes difficult to...

Last month, IBM put out its most recent earnings report – and one statistic stood out. For the first time in more than five years, revenue did not decline from the previous year’s quarter.

Cloud revenue was $17 billion for the year, while run rate in the company’s as-a-service offerings was more than $10bn. Speaking to analysts, James Kavanaugh, IBM senior VP and chief financial officer, said the company was ‘doing a lot of work to reposition [the] business, to help move clients to the...

Serverless computing, APIs and blockchain are all going to shape the cloud landscape in 2018 and beyond, according to the latest State of the Cloud report from Bessemer Venture Partners.

The influential annual report, the fourth of its kind, takes a look at the state of investments, IPOs and future trends in the cloud realm. The cloud IPO market recovered somewhat in 2017 compared to 2016’s slump, with Okta, Cloudera and MongoDB among the companies taking the plunge – yet...

More than four in five small businesses (81%) say they pay for their cloud storage, representing an increase of 10% over the last three years, according to new data from B2B research firm Clutch.

The study, which polled 300 IT decision makers at US small businesses who use cloud storage, aimed to examine what small businesses need to know when looking for a storage provider, as well as how vendors can better market their tools to small businesses.

The figures show that even small businesses who got on board...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has surpassed $5 billion (£3.6bn) in revenues for the most recent quarter, representing an almost 45% increase year over year and a $20 billion run rate.

The company’s latest financial results show revenues of $60.5bn across the company in the fourth quarter, with particular focus on Alexa. CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement that “we don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often – expect us to double down.”

In the company’s...