IBM has finally stopped its revenue slide after more than five and a half years – with the company saying it has strengthened its position as the leading enterprise cloud and blockchain player.

The Armonk giant posted revenues of $22.5 billion (£16.2bn) for the fourth quarter of 2017, up 3.5% on this time last year, where revenues were at $21.7bn. Of this figure, 40% was comprised of the technology services and cloud platforms bucket, at $9.2bn, while 24% came from cognitive solutions and 18% was...

Global spending on public cloud services is forecast to hit $160 billion in 2018 at an increase of 23.2% the previous year, according to figures from IDC.

Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest cloud category with almost two thirds of all public cloud spending this year, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Of the SaaS spend, applications purchases will dominate the segment, with CRM and enterprise resource management (ERM) apps seeing the most...

A new study from Amdocs has found that a select number of communications and media providers are rapidly adopting cloud-native technologies, giving them first mover advantage and greater opportunities for innovation.

The study, which was conducted by Analysys Mason, argues that the majority of service providers are moving slowly, hindered by legacy technology and culture. For those who are taking the plunge, the primary reason for moving to cloud-native and DevOps technologies is through greater business...

When it comes to cloud, the good news is that we’re past the period of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Everyone now agrees that the cloud is a key part of any firm’s IT investment. The not-so-good news is that there is still confusion about what to move, how to move it, and the best practices needed to protect your investment.

This was the topic of our recent webinar with Dwayne Monroe, a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Architect at...

The global cloud computing market is now worth $180 billion in vendor revenues with the market still growing by 24% annually, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The industry is put into six different buckets. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), the first, remains the fastest growing sector, with 47% growth, and – as this publication has long since explored – Amazon and Microsoft at the top of the tree. The second fastest growing area was enterprise...

Amazon has declared the adoption of the open-source technology ‘Kubernetes’ as the competition in the cloud business increases.

The technology, formulated originally by a Google team, has received support from several enterprises including Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. It is said to have many advantages including the faculty to process an application on any public cloud including Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This makes it easy for Kubernetes to migrate from one cloud vendor to another.

At...

It was ranked as the most cloud-ready area in the Asia Pacific region – and now one of the largest players in the industry is set to build a region there in 2018.

Google has announced that a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region will be opened in Hong Kong next year, making it the sixth GCP region in Asia Pacific alongside Singapore, Sydney, Taiwan, and Tokyo, as well as Mumbai, which went live earlier this month.

Including Hong Kong, the total now stands at 18 global locations and 53 zones either open...

Google has announced a price reduction for GPUs attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines by up to 36%.

For US regions – Oregon and South Carolina – NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU attached to a VM will cost $1.46 per hour, while the K80 GPU will set users back $0.45 per hour. The P100 and K80 GPUs are also available in Belgium and Taiwan

The company added that organisations such as Shazam and oilfield services provider Schlumberger were among those taking advantage of GPUs to...

With AWS re:Invent just around the corner, another piece of research which affirms Amazon’s top position in the cloud infrastructure biz; IHS Markit says the company secured more than a quarter of total infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenue in the first half of 2017.

Total revenues for what IHS defines as off-premises cloud services – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and the curious ‘cloud as a service’ (CaaS) – grew 26% year over year to total $72 billion (£54.4bn), while IBM took...

IBM has been solidly building its efforts in quantum computing over the past couple of years – and a new milestone has been reached with the launch of upgraded systems featuring 20 qubit processors, with 50 qubits on the way.

The company describes the latest news as “rapid advances in quantum hardware… as IBM continues to drive progress across the entire quantum computing technology stack, with focus on systems, software, applications and enablement.”

Quantum computing is gaining...