Tag: Google

Multinationals decline cannabidiol ads, but hemp ads OK

Nick Boardman, who launched a business called Lizard Green earlier this week, told ChannelEye that both Google and Facebook have declined to run ads for CBD products on their sites.

CBD (cannabidiol) products are routinely sold on the UK High Street by chains such as Holland & Barrett with multiple SKUs. Cannabidiol is extracted from the cannabis plant.

Google takes British privacy out of Europe’s hands

Google’s changes to privacy could have some serious implications for the channel, according to Forrester senior analyst Enza Iannopollo.

For those who came in late,  Google isn’t waiting for the end of the Brexit transition period to update its terms and conditions as they relate to privacy; the tech giant just announced that, since the United Kingdom is leaving the EU, as of March 31, 2020, Google LLC (Google’s US entity) will become the service provider and the data controller responsible for its UK users’ accounts — in lieu of Google’s European entity.

Ciauri exits Salesforce to revamp Google Cloud sales

Chris Ciauri will leave Salesforce Ciauri to spearhead Google Cloud’s sales face-lift

Ciauri has been named at Google’s EMEA cloud president, with a focus on expanding the firm’s commercial potency and reaching more customers.

He was an executive vice president EMEA at Salesforce after ten years at the company. Ciaurihas held sales roles at several tech companies, including Adobe Systems and Peoplesoft. He will lead Google Cloud’s push to improve the way it serves its existing customers.

His predecessor in the role, Sebastien Marotte, is taking on the part of vice president for the channel in EMEA.

Google shook up its remuneration structure in July by reducing the base salary for salespeople and increasing quarterly bonuses for hitting sales targets.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple will face regulation

Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple will face regulation in ten main areas over the coming years, with data privacy representing the main focus, warned  GlobalData.

GlobalData’s latest report: ‘Data privacy – Thematic research’ states that Big Tech companies have persistently evaded any form of accountability for data breaches, election manipulation, obstruction of justice, promotion of terrorist material, fake news, and online abuse perpetrated through their own internet platforms.

Gartner roasts big cloud

Analyst outfit Gartner has waded into the Big Public Cloud providers saying that they have reliability issues and poor services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud remain in the Leaders segment, while Oracle, Alibaba and IBM retain their positions in the Niche Players quadrant. However, AWS, Microsoft and Google were blasted by Big G.

Google Cloud outages expose major providers

Google’s recent Cloud outage shows that many punters would be better off with smaller niche providers.

Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced an outage which not only affected Google’s products like Gmail and YouTube – other businesses using Google Cloud, such as Shopify, Discord, and Snap were also disturbed.

Later in the month, Google Calendar went down, creating new incentives to Cloud, dedicated server and IP address provider, Heficed’s CEO Vincentas Grinius, said the outage proves that one size does not fit all and personalised solutions, better customer support, and the ability to rapidly adapt to the changing landscape were good reasons for businesses choose alternative providers.

Google promises more channel investment

Google has said that it will invest more in its channel ecosystem to boost its public cloud.

The outfit made the statement after publishing that it made more than 23 per cent more during the year ended December and banked  $136.8 billion.

Revenue for Google Cloud Platform is mentioned in the figures under “other revenues” segment along with its Play app store and hardware units. Sales for this group of products was up 31 per cent to $6.49 billion.

Amazon cements its position as market Queen

Amazon is the latest technology titan to claim the crown of world’s most valuable public company –  the outfit is worth $797 billion and beats surpasses Microsoft with $784 billion in value.

Apple, which had been part of a close three-way race for the seat, is now down to about $702 billion in market value after plunging last week on the news of its weak iPhone sales. Google parent company Alphabet has surpassed Apple with a market value of about $748 billion.

Oracle refugee replaces Greene on Google’s cloud

Thomas Kurian, former Oracle President of product development and technologist, is going to head Google Cloud from early next year.

The current CEO of Google Cloud Diane Greene will continue through January, working with Mr Kurian to ensure a smooth transition and will remain a Director on the board of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Kurian worked at Oracle for 22 years but quit over disagreements with Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison over the future course of the company as the Cloud business gets highly competitive.

“Kurian, a respected technologist and executive, will be joining Google Cloud on November 26 and transitioning into the Google Cloud leadership role in early 2019”, Ms Greene said in a statement on Friday.

Gartner purges half of cloud service providers from Magic Quadrant

lightning-cloudGartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), saw eight cloud service providers dropped from the rankings.

Virtustream, CenturyLink, Joyent, Rackspace, Interoute, Fujitsu, Skytap and NTT were all vanished from the analyst firm’s Magic Quadrant, leaving only the six largest companies.

The number cruncher’s reasons for this sudden purge was that it wanted to create a more “stringent inclusion criteria” this year, which effectively excludes all but global vendors who currently have IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.

This means Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure in the leaders’ box, with Alibaba, Oracle and IBM a long way behind.

“These changes reflect Gartner’s belief that customer evaluations are currently primarily focused on vendors for strategic adoption across a broad range of use cases. While customers still search for more focused, scenario-specific providers, these providers should be evaluated in the context of that specific workload, rather than compared in a broader market context”, according to the analyst firm.

 

Google polishes the Chrome

google-ICSearch engine outfit Google has expanded the number of enterprise mobility management platforms IT managers can use to control Chrome OS devices.

Google announced it is integrating its Chrome OS Enterprise device management suite with four mobility management vendors to offer unified end-point management (UEM) capabilities.

Last year, Google introduced its Chrome Enterprise suite and offered integration with VMware Workspace ONE’s UEM cloud portal, allowing IT shops to manage Chrome OS devices using both native Chrome Enterprise and VMware tools from a single console.

Google charges $50 per device annually for the Chrome Enterprise management service.

The Search engine Google said it has partnered with Cisco Meraki, IBM MaaS360, Citrix XenMobile and Zoho to further integrate management tools for Chrome OS with the popular EMM vendors.

“With these partnerships in place, enterprises can pick the solution that fits their business best”, Google said.

Google also announced greater capabilities for IT to manage of its Chrome browser by adding enforced existing user sign-on into Chrome.

Google eventually plans to add enterprise reporting capabilities to the browser to give IT admins access to local machine logs so they can better understand each device under their control.

The announcement is part of the company’s cunning plan to give IT administrators a single pane through which they can manage Chrome OS devices.

In general, UEM allows IT, managers, to remotely provision, control and secure everything from mobile phones to tablets, laptops, desktops and now, Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Among other things, Google’s integration with EMM vendors will let IT managers perform some tasks such as locking or disabling Chrome OS devices, whitelisting users to sign onto corporate networks via the devices, and manage other user settings.

Google has its management tools for Chrome, but few companies want to deploy stand-alone device management when they’ve already turned to enterprise mobility management (EMM) and UEM solutions from the likes of AirWatch, IBM, Citrix and others for Windows, Android or iOS.

 

Content delivery Cloud market continues to grow

lightning-cloudTransparency Market Research (TMR) has added up some numbers and divided them by its shoe size and worked out that the global cloud content delivery network market is yet to graduate from its transformational phase.

However, in a report with the punchy title  “Cloud Content Delivery Network Market (Type – Standard/Non-Video CDN and Video CDN; Core Solution – Web Performance Optimization, Media Delivery and Cloud Security; Vertical – Advertising, Media & Entertainment, Online Gaming, E-commerce, Education, Government, Healthcare, BFSI, IT, and Travel & hospitality) – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2017 – 2025.” , TMR thinks that the market is speeding its way through on the back technological breakthroughs and generous spending by the leading companies.

A title like that for a report surely makes the alphabet groan.

The investment spike will give “thrust” to the market’s transformation, letting traditional providers counter challenges posed by new services. Existing companies in the global cloud content delivery network market are paying more attention to new stuff to bust possibilities of security breaches and efficiently compete in the overall market, the report said.

Partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures have kept prospects bright for the players in the global cloud content delivery network market.

TMR identifies Akamai, Limelight, CenturyLink, CDNetworks, Google, Amazon Web Services, NTT Communications, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, and Cloudflare as some of the leading players in the business.

The global cloud content delivery network market was pegged at $3,019.6 million by TMR in 2016. Showing a 25.5 percent CAGR, the market will be worth $18,564.5 million by the end of 2025, it estimates. The market is likely to witness “soaring” demand from the media and entertainment segments. Regionally, big vendors will “catapult” North America to the head of the ratpack. Besides this, Asia Pacific is likely to show tremendous growth during the forecast period.

The demand for low-latency and high-quality digital data has increased. The report reckons that the “global society” is increasingly communicating, buying, relaxing, transacting, and learning using the internet, the demand for building efficient cloud content delivery network will rise. As traffic in video streaming grows, quality of services provided will be very important.

“As cloud content delivery networks offer improved quality control, the world will witness a spike in their deployment in the forthcoming years. Other than this, recent advances in the internet network, which have made it agiler will bode well for the market’s prospects. Also, basking in increased broadband speed and exponentially rising downloadable content, the cloud content delivery network market is likely to gain major impetus in the coming years. With organizations migrating their IT services on the cloud, TMR expects the market to gain considerable momentum shortly.”

On the negative side, the global cloud content delivery network market will continue reeling under concerns about data security, the report said.

The market is also likely to face challenges from latency problems.  Whew, the alphabet can relax a bit, now.

 

Cloud giants headed towards per-millisecond billing

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThe cloudy giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are moving towards per-millisecond billing.

Microsoft and Google already have adopted the billing method and now Amazon has gone the same way – at least for some of its services.

Amazon’s move to introduce per-second billing for some of its services forms part of a wider industry trend and could inspire similar moves by other cloud players, according to partners.

The cloud giant has announced that it will begin billing some forms of Linux instance of its EC2 and EBS services in one-second increments, bringing it into line with public cloud rivals Microsoft Azure and Google.

Amazon’s partners were happy as it seems to be part of an inexorable trend towards ‘per-millisecond’ pricing in the cloud world.

The feeling is that the world will get used to the idea and other cloud companies to follow this trend.

AWS will be able to provide sustained usage discounts, which is one remaining area where competitors claim they are cheaper.”

It appears to customers because they can reduce their TCO for workloads in cloud which in turn increases the appeal of moving new or more workloads to it.

Per-second is very helpful when running very heavy workloads, but a lot of the very large migrations to the cloud are just datacentre migrations where the private cloud providers like IBM play.  It will be less interesting to some customers.

 

Google offers second tier cloud

MI0002204246Search engine outfit Google is offering a cheaper and cheerful version of its GCP cloud network.

While it will have lower specs than the real deal, Google insists that it matches those offered by its public cloud competitors.

Writing in his bog, Google’s SVP of technical infrastructure  Urs Hölzle, said that the search engine was the first major cloud provider to offer a tiered network service, breaking its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into a Premium Tier and a Standard Tier.

“Over the last 18 years we [have] built the world’s largest network, which by some accounts delivers 25 to 30 percent of all internet traffic. You enjoy the same infrastructure with Premium Tier. But for some use cases, you may prefer a cheaper, lower-performance alternative. With Network Service Tiers, you can choose the network that’s right for you, for each application.”

The Standard Tier is available at a lower rate because it uses ISP networks to deliver traffic to a user’s cloud applications, rather than its own private network – which is used for the likes of Google Search and YouTube, Google said.

Google is unlikely to find many takers to opt for the lower standard, but that the move will be used to market the high performance of its network. The move is being touted in the channel as clever marketing.

Google lags in the size and number of datacentres but it can say its rivals don’t have the same quality.

 

Disloyal punters ignore brands claims Salmon

Salmon-of-Knowledge-Irish-Stamp-from-An-PostBeancounters at global ecommerce consultancy Salmon have discovered that the era of the ‘disloyal consumer’ is upon us.

Apparently, brand loyalty is tumbling as consumers increasingly prioritise speed, innovation and convenience when they shop.

A new study of over 6,000 consumers across the UK, US and Benelux conducted, showed that 88 percent of consumers believe speed of delivery is more important to them than the brand being ordered (78 percent).

The study also found that consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with new and innovative ways to shop, with 45 percent using or likely to use digital assistants such as Amazon Echo’s Alexa or Google Home in the next 12 months. They are more likely to use these devices than smart lighting (42 percent), smart fridges and other white goods (42 percent), Virtual Reality (40 percent) and Apple Home (37 percent). As these services look to control the products shoppers buy, brand loyalty looks set to decline even more.

Nearly 60 percent say they can see the personal benefit of Programmatic Commerce – allowing technology to automatically purchase goods for them based on their set of product preferences – compared to 53 percent the year before.

Consumer hunger for new retail technology is growing with 23 percent identified as “digitally obsessed”, making almost all of their purchases online.

This need for speed and convenience plays into a wider shift in consumer shopping behaviour, as they value the variety of digital services on offer and experience that they receive overall: 60 percent say that if a retailer was more digitally innovative, they would be more likely to shop there – emphasising the lucrative potential retailers could be tapping into, especially as 73 percent say they plan to spend more in the future.

Two thirds of consumers in fact feel all online retailers should offer same-day delivery, compared to 2016’s research showing that the average expected delivery time was 2.6 days – no doubt fuelled by services such as Amazon Prime.

Consumers are preparing for the next generation of retail technology – reflected in the fact that on average, there are four devices per household (increasing to five in the US) and over half (51 percent) of all surveyed also said they could not comfortably live one day without connected devices.

What is holding everything back is that retailers are failing to provide these elevated digital and innovative experiences for customers.

More than 57 percent believe the technology, apps and services they use in their own life are more sophisticated than that provided by digital retailers. Almost 70 percent said they want to see greater innovation to improve the customer experience, showing a desire to shop with only the most forward-thinking stores.

Hugh Fletcher, global head of Consultancy and Innovation at Salmon, said: “Loyalty is a complex thing. Across all sectors, we’re seeing fewer people favouring and remaining strongly aligned to certain brands and companies. This is especially prevalent in digital commerce – where the consumer focus on finding the lowest prices and fastest delivery doesn’t lend itself to being loyal to a certain product.

“However, as the study shows, loyalty is still there to be captured. Consumers are increasingly loyal to services over retailers – this is largely because the likes of Amazon is seen to be innovating and delivering the best overall experience to the consumer.

“It is this ‘experience’ that drives loyalty and will be the difference between being a leader in digital commerce and being left behind,” continued Fletcher. “What this means, however, is that retailers need to offer consumers a host of convenient services and harness innovative technologies in the process if they are going to attract and retain customers’ attention. As consumers are becoming more open to trying new technologies – or expect to in the coming months –retailers need to put in the ground work from now if they are to meet high expectations.”