“CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” says Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Seattle-based Skytap, “which tells me the war around the cloud hasn’t even started.”

It makes for an interesting viewpoint, considering the assertion that the market is all but sewn up. Indeed, Gartner, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), has placed Amazon Web Services...

Microsoft has announced the launch of ‘confidential computing’ in Azure, claiming to be the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use.

The project, for which a variety of Microsoft teams have been working for four years, is similar in scope to the Coco Framework, Redmond’s confidential computing blockchain initiative.

“Despite advanced...

Huawei’s Connect event kicked off earlier today – and the announcements flowed at a pace with its cloud offering front and centre of the majority of the news.

First off was the announcement of a partnership between the Chinese giant and Microsoft with Redmond’s apps being released on Huawei’s platform as part of an ‘in-depth cooperation on the public cloud.’

The two companies signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to seal the deal whereby more Microsoft enterprise-level...

Microsoft has extended its lead over Salesforce in the enterprise software as a service (SaaS) market with the LinkedIn acquisition starting to make its presence felt, according to Synergy Research.

The analyst firm, which has put out a note based on Q2 data, finds Adobe, Oracle and SAP round out the top five, with Salesforce still comfortably in the silver medal position.

Salesforce still bests Microsoft in the CRM space – the slowest growing of the buckets enterprise SaaS is measured in (below)...

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Connecticut-based Cycle Computing to help provide easier access to high performance computing (HPC) in Azure.

Cycle has been in business since 2005 and provides orchestration software running both off the primary public cloud providers as well as in private cloud environments. Its core tenet is that ‘greater access to compute enables people to ask bigger questions, faster answers and a better world’, in the company’s own words.

According to the...

Microsoft has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a San Francisco-based organisation aiming at sustaining containers and microservices architectures, as a platinum member.

The Redmond giant joins 14 other companies in the platinum membership category, including Docker, Google – who originally designed Kubernetes before donating it to the CNCF – and IBM.

The foundation’s mission statement is to “create and drive the adoption of a new computing paradigm that is optimised...

A few headlines in the tech and business press over recent months have attempted to shed light on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the public cloud.

As reported by The Street last week, Brent Bracelin, senior research analyst at Pacific Crest, wrote: “We estimate that in the second half of this year, Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud segment could...

Microsoft has announced revenues of $23.3 billion (£17.9bn) in its most recent financial quarter – with cloud again at the heart of its success.

This will be something of a familiar story to those who have taken notice of Microsoft’s financials over the past year or so, with CEO Satya Nadella telling analysts that financial year 2017 “all up was a tremendous year of customer momentum with cloud, AI, and digital transformation.”

Microsoft does not disclose specific product...

As one company in the cloud monitoring space announces funding, another goes a different route: Microsoft has confirmed it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Israel-based Cloudyn.

The move will help Azure customers manage and optimise their cloud usage, as a blog post...

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Box and Microsoft have announced an expansion to their partnership – with machine learning as part of the potential benefits.

The two companies will align on sales efforts – co-selling Box with Azure, for instance – with the former using the latter as a ‘strategic public cloud platform’.

Yet it is the machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) aspect which leapt out most. The references in the press materials were all shrouded in modal verbs like...

Gartner has released its latest Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure and a service (IaaS) – and while Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft will continue to get the plaudits, the real story is to be found nearer the bottom left.

As per 2016, AWS and Microsoft are the only two companies in the ‘leaders’ zone, with Google pushing hard in the ‘visionaries’ side, with Microsoft moving closer to AWS in terms of completeness of vision year over year.

Yet while there were only 10 vendors in the...

• Public cloud spending is predicted to grow quickly, attaining 16% year-over-year growth in 2017.
• Cowen’s AWS segment model is predicting Revenue and EBITDA to grow 25% and 26.8% annually from 2017 to 2022.
• Microsoft Azure is viewed as the platform that customers would most likely purchase or renew going forward (28% of total vs. AWS at 22%, GCP at 15%, and IBM at 10%).

These and many other fascinating insights are from Cowen’s study published this...

Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation continuing its push into the open source space, the latter has announced.

The Redmond giant has joined as a gold member – although their logo is yet to appear on the Foundation’s member list at the time of publication – alongside the likes of Accenture, Google, and Huawei.

Platinum members – Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware – pay $500,000 per annum with a commitment to three years, compared to...

A new piece of research from cloud security provider Zscaler looks at the issues with deploying Office 365 in large organisations – and found that companies still suffered from latency despite upgrading their firewalls.

The study, which polled more than 200 respondents from organisations with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, found more than two thirds of respondents had beefed up their firewalls in preparation for Office 365 – a typical tactic for deployments – yet 69% reported...

The rapid growth of Azure is certainly exciting for customers who have bought into the Microsoft stack. This momentum means quickly evolving product lines, balanced pricing and improved cloud services. However, dominant competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had more time to feel and subsequently address growing pains that Azure users are now starting to feel. This means that AWS users have more options available to them to address certain concerns that come with using public cloud. Chief among these...

Analysis April 27 saw Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft release its most recent financial results, with cloud at the heart of their success. But this doesn’t quite tell the full story.

Amazon reported net sales for Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit $3.66 billion (£2.83bn), up 42% from a year before, but up only 3.5% from the previous quarter’s $3.54bn.

Amazon’s cloud computing arm secured 12 bullet points of its own in the 32-point...

Microsoft has announced a slew of new customers using its Azure cloud services at its Digital Difference event in New York, including financial services provider UBS and confectioner Hershey.

The customer announcements came alongside the release of a new study, sponsored by Microsoft and put together by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which found less than half of business leaders have a coherent digital strategy despite 80% saying their industry will be positively impacted by digital transformation within...

Opinion Imagine a business where the product keeps getting better and better, like storage space and video quality, but the prices keep falling steadily as the product continues to improve. It’s happening in cloud computing – and this ‘race to zero’ has people in the industry deeply worried.

The current leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS), slashed their prices an astounding 44 times in the past six years. Amazon’s strategy, it seems, is more of a low cost, high volume model. This strategy...

Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft IoT Central, a software as a service (SaaS) offering which aims to reduce the complexity of Internet of Things solutions for customers.

The new launch goes hand in hand with Microsoft’s current platform as a service (PaaS), Azure IoT Suite, built on the Azure cloud, with the latter enabling deep customisation and control of implementations. IoT Central ‘has the potential to dramatically increase the speed at which manufacturers can innovate and bring...

The cloud skills gap is widening and almost 40% of businesses are now struggling to find the qualified employees they need, according to Microsoft’s recent Cloud Skills Report. This is an incredible opportunity for professionals who can prove their cloud knowledge.

Determined professionals validate their knowledge and set themselves apart from the competition with training and certifications. The same report from Microsoft also found that tech leaders believe professionals with formal qualifications in cloud...