From cut-throat competition, eyebrow-raising co-opetition, and major advances in cloud-based machine learning, 2017 was a pivotal - and productive - year for the cloud, setting the stage for what looks likely to be the most exciting year yet. 

The market swing is already in full force. Thanks to a full-fledged embrace by the enterprise, the cloud is undergoing dramatic transformation as vendors rush to meet the infrastructure and business needs of today's top companies. 

By now, the benefits of public cloud are well known. Better performance, lower costs, agility and greater flexibility are all key motivators to enable digital transformation. With these benefits in mind, it’s understandable why an organisation might choose to consolidate its data centres and move all of its applications to the cloud, so what is still holding some of them back? Often we hear about cost and security considerations, but within businesses that run bespoke mission-critical apps, the IT team...

The Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing are among the key application markets in driving semiconductor providers’ revenue streams over the coming year, according to a new report from KPMG.

Of the 150 semiconductor industry leaders surveyed by the professional service provider, three quarters said wireless communications, including smartphones and other mobile devices, are either important or very important. This number is down from 84% in 2016. IoT was cited by 63%...

Blockchain technologies hold ‘great promise’ for securing connected devices and systems, according to a new paper from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

The report, put together by the alliance’s Blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group and titled ‘Using Blockchain Technology to Secure the Internet of Things’, explores the intersection between the two technologies, as well as giving an extensive overview of deployment options.

As the report puts it, a cloud-enabled...

Google has announced that its cloud tensor processing unit (TPU) chips are available in beta on Google Cloud Platform, aimed at speeding and scaling up specific machine learning workloads.

The company claims that using the new chips will help train business-critical machine learning models in hours rather than days or weeks. The units will utilise TensorFlow, the open source machine learning framework, with up to 180 teraflops of floating point performance – in other words, being capable of handling 180...

• Enterprise investments in machine learning will nearly double over the next three years, reaching 64% adoption by 2020.
• International Data Corporation (IDC) is forecasting spending on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will grow from $8B in 2016 to $47B by 2020.
• 89% of CIOs are either planning to use or are using machine learning in their organizations today.
• 53% of CIOs say machine learning is one of their core priorities as their role expands from traditional IT operations management to business strategists.
• CIOs are struggling to find the skills they need to build their...

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...

Microsoft continues to cite the cloud as the key to its success; the company has posted revenues of $28.9 billion and operating income of $8.7bn for Q218, an increase of 12% and 10% respectively.

While the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, saying its revenue has gone up 98%, its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket – which focuses on Azure and server products, saw revenues of $7.8bn, an increase of 15% year over year, while the ‘productivity and business processes’...

Web and mobile applications are a key differentiator between healthcare providers in a highly competitive industry — customers want to be able to access their healthcare records, prescriptions, and associated data in the way that is most convenient to them. Healthcare providers who aren’t online are falling behind.

In the rush to build online services, it may be tempting to take shortcuts where protected health information (PHI) hosting is concerned. After all, a standard web hosting provider is...

Red Hat has announced the acquisition of CoreOS, a provider of Kubernetes and container solutions, for $250 million (£176.5m).

The move will help Red Hat ‘further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source’, as the company put it. “We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments,” said Paul Cornier, Red Hat president of products...

Updating or modernising key legacy applications and moving them to the cloud has become a high priority for organisations as they pursue digital transformation. But for various reasons, some legacy applications will have been deemed best left alone, left to run on in-house systems.

But as ever smarter cloud-accessible technologies become available, offering massive data processing capabilities, machine learning and artificial intelligence for example, the reasons for continuing to leave these remaining...

Quantum computing promises much – but are organisations secure enough to make the most of it? According to a new report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), companies are aware of the risk of quantum computing but not yet ready to take action.

The alliance had previously put together the Quantum Safe Security Working Group (QSS WG) to assess the risks of the emerging technology. According to today’s report, which polled more than 100 CSA members with more than 90% working in either IT or...

• There has been a 14X increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000.
• Investment into AI startups by venture capitalists has increased 6X since 2000.
• The share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013.

These and many other fascinating insights are from Stanford University’s inaugural AI Index (PDF, no opt-in, 101 pp.). Stanford has undertaken a 

“Machine learning is so tantalizing for most every day developers and scientists. Still, there are a lot of constraints for builders….How do we turn machine learning from a capability of the few, into something that many more people can take advantage of?” – Andy Jassy, Keynote from AWS re:Invent 2017

The fintech industry has been hyped about the potential of machine learning technology for years. Despite all the noise, it’s still very early for most companies. Expert...

During much of 2017, it was possible to read many articles that predicted the end of cloud computing and favour edge computing instead. However, there is also the view that believes edge computing and cloud computing are extensions of one another. In other words, the two technological models are expected to work together. Cloud...

A new report from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and Ensono argues that while the vast majority of organisations are undertaking digital transformation initiatives – led by various members of the C-suite – KPIs are not aligning with objectives.

The study, conducted by Vanson Bourne, polled 200 IT and business decision makers in the UK, finding the usual disparity between IT and business. For instance, 22% on respondents on the biz side said they believed their organisation had completed its...

• Machine learning engineers, data scientists, and big data engineers rank among the top emerging jobs on LinkedIn.
• Data scientist roles have grown over 650% since 2012, but currently, 35,000 people in the US have data science skills, while hundreds of companies are hiring for those roles.
• There are currently 1,829 open machine learning engineering positions on LinkedIn.
• Job growth in the next decade is expected to outstrip growth during the previous decade, creating 11.5m jobs by 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

These and many other...

It’s been another exciting year in the cloud computing space. From blockchain, to AI, to containers and microservices, the technological developments have made for interesting reading – as well as the continued pushes by the leading companies in the ecosystem.

Below, CloudTech has put together five trends which shaped 2017, featuring some of the biggest stories of last year, as well as a series of predictions from executives on what they expect from 2018.

2017

The AWS/Azure competition – with Alibaba and Oracle on...

Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Cmpute.io to help organisations get the most out of their multi-cloud deployments.

The acquisition, which is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s 2018 fiscal year, was announced on Cisco’s blog, with Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team, writing that the addition of Cmpute.io’s technology will “help customers optimise their cloud...

It may be holiday season in the US – but two companies who probably won’t be on the same Thanksgiving table are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. The two largest public cloud providers appear to have crossed paths again, this time over security giant Symantec.

Late last night, AWS issued a missive announcing that Symantec has chosen the Seattle firm as its ‘strategic infrastructure provider for the vast majority of its cloud workloads’.

According to the press materials, Symantec...