TECHNOLOGY

$100bn revenues and networking maturation %

Published

1 year ago

July 28, 2023

The tech media has spent years arguing whether innovation and market size within infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has finally topped out – but the most recent figures show there is still some way to go yet.

2022 saw the worldwide IaaS market grew by almost 30% (29.7%) to total $120.3 billion (£93.6bn) in revenue, according to figures totted up by Gartner. Amazon maintained the number one spot, with Microsoft as runner up. Alibaba retains third place ahead of Google – though at 7.7% and 7.5% market share respectively, it is a negligible lead – with Huawei in fifth position. The top five vendors accounted for more than 80% of the market, Gartner added.

Within this are interesting examples of evolution in themselves. Google Cloud filed the most profitable quarter in the company’s history earlier this month, with an operating income of $395m during Q2 2023. This compared with a loss of $590m this time last year. Microsoft, meanwhile, posted an all-time best net income of $20.1bn. Yet the company stalled with regard to Azure – whose figure is allocated across several buckets rather than being entirely disclosed – which grew only 26%, compared with 27% the previous quarter.

The narrative driving these figures is, of course, AI. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai outlined their thought process where the cloud infrastructure and AI markets are converging in their earnings calls.

“Azure… the way I think about is we still are [at] inning two or three of even cloud migration, especially when you view is whether by industry moves to the cloud, segment move… as well as country adoption of the cloud,” said Nadella. “There’s still early innings of the cloud migration itself, there’s a lot there still – and then on top of that, there is this completely new world of AI driving a new set of workloads.”

“When I think about it long-term, I view the AI opportunity as expanding our total addressable market and allows us to win new customers,” Pichai told analysts. “The scale of investments that we can directly bring into [Google] Cloud now – we have over 80 models across Vertex [AI], Enterprise, Search and Conversational AI, and we are taking all of them, translating it into deep industry solutions.”

For the hyperscale cloud providers, AI has long been a service to provide on top of the infrastructure. Gartner has seen this play out for some time, having added platform as a service (PaaS) to its IaaS Magic Quadrant in 2020, recognising expanded enterprise use cases. “IaaS is driving software as a service and platform as a service growth as buyers continue to add more applications to the cloud and modernise existing ones,” said Sid Nag, VP analyst at Gartner.

Nag added that the maturity of the IaaS market has led to a ‘slight softening’ from the end of 2022, as companies use their allocated capacity, but another acceleration should come in 2024.

“Generative AI will continue to drive the cloud market forward, particularly as hyperscalers look to support offerings beyond the existing, democratised generative AI solutions,” said Nag. “As enterprises integrate generative AI into their technology portfolio, new markets and opportunities for cloud hyperscalers will emerge related to sovereignty, ethics, privacy, and sustainability.”

Meanwhile, IDC has posited that worldwide revenue for what the analyst describes as IaaS cloud networking services will reach almost $20bn ($19.4bn) this year, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.9% from 2022 to 2026.

IDC defines this space as ‘public cloud-based IaaS network services in which all the network infrastructure and services are elastic and on-demand.’ The primary example of such networking technology is cloud connects and interconnects – in other words, either providing a dedicated network to connect to the cloud versus linking multiple connections to enable data exchange – while other examples include cloud WANs, IaaS service meshes, and VPNs to IaaS clouds.

Again, this is an area where the hyperscalers are wielding significant leverage and investment. IDC noted that the top five public cloud IaaS vendors – the analyst puts Google ahead of Alibaba and swaps Tencent in for Huawei – were also the leaders in the IaaS cloud networking market. Organisations’ hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are helping to define this market.

“Cloud connects/interconnects are foundational to every cloud strategy as these make it possible for enterprises to quickly and securely connect their on-premises and edge environments to IaaS providers,” said Rohit Metra, IDC group vice president, network and telecommunications. “The rise of multi-cloud and SaaS applications that meet the demands of the modern distributed workforce in enterprises is the driver of rapid growth in cloud WANs and other IaaS network services.”

So if you are thinking there is little left to uncover in the IaaS market – it may be time to think again.

Photo by zhang kaiyv

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James has a passion for how technologies influence business and has several Mobile World Congress events under his belt. James has interviewed a variety of leading figures in his career, from former Mafia boss Michael Franzese, to Steve Wozniak, and Jean Michel Jarre. James can be found tweeting at @James_T_Bourne.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

10 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

10 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

10 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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