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...

More than one in three companies admit it has been either ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to find specific cloud skills for their organisation, according to a new study from Microsoft.

The dreaded ‘cloud skills gap’ has been long reported by this publication – ‘the trend will continue further through 2013’, this reporter once warned – but in the Microsoft...

An ‘enormous’ opportunity is afoot for cloud companies as more organisations move towards implementing hybrid cloud and managed services, according to a new study from Microsoft.

The report – which was conducted in association with 451 Research and which comes in at a whopping 127 pages – polled more than 1700 respondents in 10 geographies, and found that almost two thirds (62%) of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes bundled with value-added services. When it came to...

Adobe and Microsoft have announced the first set of joint solutions to ‘help enterprises transform their customer experiences’, with Adobe’s Experience Cloud combining alongside Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power BI products.

Those with good memories will recall an announcement made last September which confirmed Azure would become the preferred cloud platform for Adobe’s...

Even though software as a service (SaaS) is more mature than its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) brethren – and therefore at a lower growth rate – new figures from Synergy Research show that Microsoft leads the ‘burgeoning’ market ahead of Salesforce, with Oracle and Google having the highest growth rates.

Despite the relatively low growth forecast, Synergy argues that the enterprise SaaS market is expected to double in size over the next three years...

(c)iStock.com/Nicolas McComber

It continues to gain traction whilst still being significantly behind the market leader; but what underpins this growth? A new study from NetEnrich has found that while Microsoft Azure continues to see impressive usage figures, companies have to rely on channel providers to help them make the most of their implementations.

The survey, which garnered the views of more than 80 IT professionals in large and midmarket companies, found 46% of respondents were running at least half of...

(c)iStock.com/RonBailey

Microsoft has announced the launch of the Azure IP Advantage program to help protect intellectual property from ‘patent trolls’ in the cloud.

Patent trolls, defined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as companies or people who ‘use patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming up with new ideas’, are becoming an increasing problem with code and products hosted on cloud servers.

As a result, Microsoft is making 10,000...

(c)iStock.com/CatLane

It’s that time again; another quarter passes by and with it comes a variety of financial reports from the big hitters. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, IBM, and Microsoft have all filed within the past week – so what do the figures all mean?

Top line highlights:

• IBM’s cloud revenue was at $13.7 billion for the full year of 2016, up 35%, while fourth quarter cloud revenues increased 33% to $4.2bn
• Microsoft’s commercial cloud annualised revenue run rate hit $14 billion, with Azure revenue up 95% in constant currency...

(c)iStock.com/cherezoff

Enterprises prefer Microsoft Azure as their primary cloud provider while smaller businesses are more likely to be Google houses, according to the latest research from B2B analysis firm Clutch.

The findings, which polled almost 250 users of AWS, Google and Microsoft, appear in the firm’s latest report, found almost 40% of Azure users polled identify as enterprises, compared to only 25% for SMBs...

(c)iStock.com/tumpikuja

Goldman Sachs has upgraded its rating on Microsoft from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’ after praising the company’s Azure growth.

According to a report from StreetInsider, Goldman Sachs’ Heather Bellini raised the price target from $60 to $68 noting Azure’s continued growth; 100% or greater, year over year, in eight of the...

(c)iStock.com/photogearch

Microsoft has announced it will be increasing its prices for customers buying its enterprise software and cloud services in British pounds by up to 22% from January to “harmonise” within the EU and EFTA (European Free Trade Association) regions.

The company said on-premise enterprise software will increase by 13% to align closer to the Euro, while “most” enterprise cloud prices will rise by almost a quarter, adding that after the adjustment customers will...