The battle for viewership in the streaming age is well and truly joined. Amazon and Netflix, the two leading players in this market, have both redoubled their efforts to get the upper hand in market share, creating original programming and investing in its infrastructure.

Netflix, notably, has a ‘Long Term View’, first outlined a year ago and updated several times...

Earlier this week, IBM announced another series of cloudy launches, chief of which being the IBM Cloud Marketplace, a ‘one stop shop’ for IBM’s IaaS, PaaS and SaaS portfolio. CloudTech caught up with Doug Clark, cloud leader at IBM UK&I, to find out more.

“Everybody is moving to as-a-service,” Doug Clark, cloud leader at IBM UK&I says. “Almost the entire landscape is moving there.”

With the release of the IBM...

A US judge has ruled that US-based providers must hand over customer emails even if they are stored in a location overseas.

The decision comes amidst a challenge from Microsoft with regard to an Ireland-based customer, claiming that as the US government does not have jurisdiction overseas the company should not be forced to disclose user data.

Yet Judge James C. Francis has dismissed this claim, further jeopardising the data security of US cloud providers.

Judge Francis explained the issue at stake....

IBM has announced the launch of the IBM Cloud Marketplace, with Big Blue putting all its cloudy apps and software in one place in what the company calls “the next major step in IBM’s cloud leadership.”

The usual suspects are all there, from 100 SaaS apps, to the newly-launched PaaS developer offering BlueMix, to IaaS package SoftLayer. IBM has categorised each part of the marketplace appropriately – Biz, described as “enterprise-grade business apps to accelerate innovation”...

SAP’s first quarter 2014 figures, released last week, revealed that while the tech giant’s cloud subscription numbers were going up, its software revenues continue to stall.

This will come as no surprise to those who have been following events with the German firm, who indirectly prophesised this outcome back in January with the Q413 numbers sheet.

At the time, SAP said in a statement that the ‘fast-growing cloud business along with growth in support revenue will drive a higher proportion of...

The latest Red Hat Summit taking place in San Francisco from April 14 to 17 has resulted in several product launches, partnerships and collaborations. CloudTech has gobbled up the releases and put together a summary of the essential material.

Day one saw the launch of the OpenShift Marketplace, a software store which allows Red Hat customers to access complementary third party solutions from partners for the open source provider’s PaaS offering, OpenShift.

With this unveiling Red Hat joins an ever-growing list of...

Virtualisation giant VMware has announced ‘VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery’, a service which provides a continuously available recovery site if a VMware data centre hits the skids.

The system, which promises an RPO (recovery point objective) of 15 minutes, offers 1 terabyte of storage from a minimum pricing point of $835 a month, with the service available in all five of VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service data centres in the US and UK.

The overall effect is that VMware has...

Back in September, Nirvanix announced to its customers that they had two weeks to move its data before the company went down the plughole.

As the enterprise cloud storage provider waved the white flag, Gartner research director Kyle Hilgendorf noted in a blog post that the analyst house’s paper on cloud exit strategies was one of the least popular in the collection.

“I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as...

Enterprise file-sharing platform provider Egnyte has today announced significant expansion in Europe, hiring a general manager and opening up a London branch.

The company has moved Mark Rattley to the top EMEA job, with the former EMC vice president of sales coming on board as vice president and general manager for the new Egnyte Europe.

Egynte isn’t just looking to London for expansion however, with a data centre previously opened in the Netherlands, as well as a 25-strong design and engineering team...

Exclusive Nikola Pizurica, president of the company which provides the OneBigDrive cloud storage app, has told CloudTech that while Microsoft renaming its storage biz OneDrive “could lead to some confusion” for consumers, the company is focused on its own goals.

“We are going our way,” he affirms, although adding he was ‘surprised’ at the time that Microsoft chose to rename to OneDrive.

Redmond had courted angry companies

According to the latest research from government cloud provider Eduserv, a lack of awareness and skills around cloud computing is halting its adoption in central government.

The research, conducted in January and February of 829 civil servants, found that nearly nine in 10 (88%) required some form of training in order to take advantage of cloud computing, whilst three quarters (75%) believed the benefits of their cloud were a mystery to the company as a whole.

The survey results also shed some doubt on the...

Cloud services provider Interoute has announced the launch of a new virtual data centre (VDC) in Hong Kong, joining other vendors in setting up shop in the lucrative Asian region.

The company also announced that its customers can move data and apps across the entire services platform, across VDC zones, for no cost.

Lee Myall, the general manager of Interoute’s enterprise app store CloudStore, told CloudTech that while European expansion was still key, this was big news for Interoute on a global...

UK-based hosting provider FlintHosts has announced the launch of Flint|Charity, a service which offers free shared hosting and discounted cloud hosting to charities.

The free shared package allows for up to 1GB of storage, one hour of free technical support and a name check from the company, while the cloud package offers the requisite name check, hosting on Flint’s enterprise level platform at a 50% discount with fully managed service.

Paul Hopkinson, FlintHosts managing director, believes having...

Microsoft has announced price cuts on its compute facility by up to 35% and its storage by up to 65%, days after Google and Amazon Web Services did likewise.

Perhaps this is the least surprising news of the year – Amazon’s price cuts being the second least surprising. That said, everyone suspected Redmond’s cloud announcement wasn’t going to be just renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

Cloud is ‘driving the bulk of change’ in the software market as Salesforce.com becomes the first pure play cloud company to make the top 10 companies for global software revenue, according to analyst house Gartner.

“The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things movement,” said Gartner...

Sketch “We apologise for bringing the rain down with us from Seattle,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services SVP in a slightly sheepish opening.

It was an opening delayed by half an hour because of weather and traffic fears, but those who had made it through the elements to San Francisco were treated to various client testimonials. Ranging from Adobe, to Airbnb and Twilio, they came in a variety of industries and a variety of languages – the latter seemingly to prove AWS’ customer base was...

Amazon Web Services has announced big price cuts across its cloud computing portfolio at an event in San Francisco – one day after rival Google did the same.

Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president, explained to delegates in his keynote speech that lowering prices was “not new” for AWS, laying out the company’s latest price drop.

The facts: Amazon’s S3 storage cloud gets a pricing tier decrease from 36% to 65%. M3 gets an average 38% decrease, while C3 gets 30% - these were Linux...

You need a PhD to work out the best option, says Google SVP

Google has cut prices for its cloudy infrastructure across the board, aiming to “blend IaaS and PaaS” as well as change the outlook of the cloud pricing wars.

The Mountain View giant is reducing the price of its IaaS offering Compute Engine by a third (32%) ‘across all sizes, regions and classes’, ‘significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances’ for the PaaS product App Engine, a two...

You can’t say it wasn’t coming. Cloud storage provider Box has announced its public offering after a huge amount of rumour and conjecture, with the overall amount raised expected to hit around $250m.

The company is looking to trade under the NYSE symbol ‘BOX’ and confirms reports in January that the cloud storage bods had confidentially filed.

The number of shares and their price wasn’t disclosed in the...

German giant misses its emissions target, slowly moves towards the green cloud for its customers

SAP has announced that it will power its data centres, and all other facilities, using 100% renewable electricity, pushing an environmentally friendly message as the software giant moves towards a cloud business model.

The news was included in SAP’s 2013 Integrated Report, which was made available last week, with overall energy figures creeping up –...