Social networking king Mark Zuckerberg slammed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon Web services (AWS) for its soaring costs in cloud computing and data storage.
Zuckerberg’s remarks came during his speech at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropic organisation that organised a seminar on the challenges in scientific research.
During the live-streamed discussion, Zuckerberg said one of the new challenges with cutting-edge research and start-ups is the high cost of computing services.
Most IT directors want to buy cloud services from one provider but most have ended up buying stuff from three or more vendors.
That’s according to Martin Bishop, from Telstra, who released a survey showing two thirds of decision makers would like to plump for one vendor rather than many.
Bishop said that it’s a buyers’ market for cloud services but using multiple vendors could well mean a complex bank of clouds that make it difficult to manage and to control.
The research shows that four in ten of UK enterprises have adopted IaaS and another forty percent more have plans to adopt it.
Deployment of IaaS varies with manufacturing (61%), professional services *54%) and finance and insurance (46%) likely to use the cloud tech.
The company reached its findings by using Vanson Bourne to canvass 675 IT decision makers across five different geographies – the organisations are enterprises in the private sector with 250 or more employees.
Dell said it has introduced the second series of of its XC Series web scale converged devices.
The units are aimed at data centre customers and Dell claimed they have now over 50 percent more storage capacity and twice the rack densities.
They’re intended to support many different kinds of workloads including private cloud, big data and virtual desktop infrastructures.
The appliances are based on Dell PowerEdge server technology with Nutanix software and bundled with Dell global services and support.
The appliances now offer additional drive options including for both flash and conventional hard drives. Each rack unit can support up to 16 terabytes per rack unit, and a number of options for multiple drives, memory and microprocessors.
Dell is now offering a compact 1U form factor with the XC630 model, while the XC730xd will support up to 32 terabytes of memory.
The units will be up for sale in early March.
IBM has already invested $1.2 billion in cloud services and has now announced it will open two cloud centres in Sydney and Montreal in the next 30 days.
In addition, Big Blue said it will build similar cloud centres in Milan, and in Chennai before the end of 2015 while it will announce further centres later on in the year.
The cloud centres are part of the company’s SoftLayer plans – it already has centres in Frankfurt, in Mexico and in Tokyo.
The idea of the cloud centres is to give its customers options to create public, private or hybrid cloud environments. It has to offer different locations because enterprises have to conform to local regulations about where data resides, as well as providing levels of security.
Jim Comfort, general managed of IBM Cloud Services, said: “With each new location, we’re not only adding more computer capacity… we’re enabling enterprises to move to the cloud at the speed and in a way that makes the most sense for them.”
In a related announcement, IBM said it had extended its partnership with CSC to speed moving their businesses to the cloud. IBM thinks that there will be a 10 fold increase in the number of cloud applications in the next four or five years, meaning the number of developers specialising in the field will triple.
A report from Gartner said cloud services in the subcontinent will be worth $838 by the end of this year.
By 2018, spending on public IT cloud services is set to be worth $127 billion.
That’s according to research from IDC, which indicates a five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 percent – six times the rate for the IT market overall.
The spending is a result of the conjunction of IT vendors offering more services and buyers wanting to buy more kit.
IDC thinks much of the growth is likely to be industry platforms with their own communities.
The news is good for developers, as their numbers will triple and create as many as a 10 time increase of new cloud offerings.
And the offerings will be strategic rather than tactical.
IDC expects a great deal of consolidation in the cloud services industry as a result of increased competition.
Software as a service (SaaS) will dominate public IT cloud services spending – accounting for as much as 70 percent of expenditure this year. That’s because customer demand is chiefly at the application level, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
Software giant Microsoft said today it has added a number of additions to its Azure offerings.
At a conference in Barcelona, Jason Zander, VP of Azure, said that it will release Azure “Operational Insights” which combines HD Insight and MS System Centre to gather and analyse machine data across clouds.
Azure Batch gives access to thousands of cores to analyse complex problems while Azure Automation, as its name suggests, allows batch operations on both Azure and third party environments.
Microsoft said it has also made improvements to security with support for multiple network interface cards (NICs), Network Security Groups for creating security boundaries and giving better control over traffic flow, and a service, at no charge, called Anti-Malware for virtual machines.
The company also said it has improved its Enterprise Mobility Suite and Office 365, allowing administrators to manage Office mobile apps, conditional access features, and secure mobile app viewing. These improvements will arrive in the next few months, Zander said.
Cloud service company Databarracks said it has introduced a reseller network called the deProgramme.
What does this mean? According to Phil Gunning, channel manager at the company, channel players have been “victims of complexity. The point of any channel partnership for both parties is to reach more customers.”
He hit out at labels and jargon.
“Customers don’t care whether you’re a gold certified partner or if you’ve sat through hours of vendor training.”
His deProgramme, he claims, will eliminate red tape.
“The vast majority of channel programmes are broken. They’ve been too prescriptive without offering enough individual support or incentive for partners to thrive. Our most successful partners are the ones who work with us and take advantage of our resources to sell more and better support their customers.”
Databarracks will show off its services at Cloud Expo at the horrendous Excel conference centre, later this week.
A report said the consequences of the credit crunch in 2008 has concentrated the minds of the financial sector and helped them to understand the benefits cloud services can bring.
According to the report, UK Financial Services Sector SITS Market Trends and Forecasts, from Tech Market View, the crash prompted “draconian cost cutting measures and rapid withdrawal from marginal business areas”. But returning confidence in investment markets and other factors including more conservative ambitions have lead companies to concentrate on transforming costs.
The authors of the report said it is now clear to both customers and vendors that the last 18 months has seen a change in attitudes towards cloud services.
Their opinion now is that the sector will use cloud services to make the changes to costs. “Earlier concerns about security have moderated somewhat and… many companies have developed working practices and systems to limit the threat.”
And large customers now seem to be convinced of the benefits of private clouds. The report points to Lloyds Banking Group creating a cloud system for Unix and Windows servers.
Nevertheless, use of the cloud in core banking and transaction processing “is a long way off”.
Companies worried about the dangers of cloud computing can set their minds at ease, if a recent survey from Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) is to be credited.
Based on questions asked of 250 senior IT business decision makers, it shows 69 percent of firms already use cloud based services.
But it’s all a bit of a mix because 86 percent of the respondents said they had a hybrid mix including cloud, servers on their premises and hosted services.
Piers Linney, CEO of Outsourcery reckons that a gradual move to the cloud happens because companies don’t want to replace their entire systems or only use cloud for some aspects of their businesses.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Outsourcery offers cloud services and no doubt Outsourcery is happy to learn that the survey shows 91 percent of those surveyed are happy with providers.
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