Tag: Amazon

Amazon’s Valentine’s Day Massacre

Posted on February 14, 2024 by - News

Amazon’s workforce staged a Valentine’s Day revolt yesterday, leaving the e-commerce giant reeling. The battle lines were drawn as employees demanded fair wages and weren’t alone in their fight.

Delivery drivers, including those from popular food apps like Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Eat, are set to join the fray.

It appears that now is Amazon’s winter of discount tents as they walk out on Wednesday, in a strategic move timed to coincide with the peak demand for swift Valentine’s Day dinner deliveries across Britain.

The GMB trade union has thrown its weight behind the workers, calling for a three-day strike at Amazon’s colossal Coventry facility. The heart of England will echo with their demands, as pay disparities continue to widen.

Amazon’s cloud grip crumbling as Vole storms ahead

Posted on February 7, 2024 by - News

Amazon Web Services, the big bully of the global cloud market, is losing its grip as AWS’ cloud market share fell two points, while Microsoft’s cloud share rose by nearly two points year-on-year in the last quarter of 2023.

IT market researchers Synergy Research Group said businesses splashed out $73.7 billion  on cloud services in the last quarter of 2023, a 20 per cent jump from $61.6 billion in the same quarter of 2022,

Synergy VP John Dinsdale said it was a cracking quarter for the cloud market. As the market grows like mad, Amazon, Vole, and Google still rake in most of the cash.

Amazon Web Services releases new clouds in the EU

Posted on October 30, 2023 by - News

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is about to offer its new sovereign cloud solution in the European Union (EU)  tailored to cater to government entities and industries with stringent regulatory requirements.

The move comes in response to the increasing demand for cloud solutions that adhere to Europe’s tight data privacy rules and the concept of ‘digital sovereignty,’ which emphasises European control over data and technology.

Dubbed the Amazon Web Services European Sovereign Cloud, this new infrastructure will operate separately from Amazon’s other cloud services, exclusively using servers located within the EU.

Sky’s the limit on UK competition probe

Posted on October 9, 2023 by - News

The UK’s cloud computing market faces a competition probe over concerns that Amazon and Microsoft are ruling everything with an iron fist.

Media watchdog Ofcom said the two make up 70-80 per cent of the sector in the UK, while closest rival Google has 5-10 per cent.

Ofcom had said in April it was worried a lack of competition made it difficult for businesses to switch providers.

It has referred the sector to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to look into the issue.

Amazon and Microsoft told the BBC they would work with the CMA as it conducts its investigation. However, Amazon said it felt Ofcom’s concerns were “based on a fundamental misconception” of the sector.

The services are used by businesses across the UK, and Ofcom estimated that in 2022 the cloud services market in the UK was worth up to £7.5 billion.

Meta rolls out generative AI tools for advertisers

Posted on October 6, 2023 by - News

Meta is starting to roll out generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools for all advertisers.

It claims these functions can create content like image backgrounds and produce variations of written text.

The company started testing these tools in May, giving access to a select group of advertisers in a “testing playground”.

The new features will be available in Meta’s Ads Manager when their official rollout is completed next year.

The announcement marks the Facebook and Instagram owner’s first moves into bundling generative AI technology into its products for mining vast stores of past data to generate new content like prose, art and software code.

Toughest EU rules hit Big Tech on Friday

Posted on August 23, 2023 by - News

On Friday, Big tech vendors will face the toughest regulation of online content since the arrival of GDPR.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) forces companies to more aggressively police digital content and protect online users from disinformation and hate speech or face heavy fines.

Technology law professor Suzanne Vergnolle said the DSA is part of a bigger strategy to give more power to individuals, to the regulators, to civil society.

“It is another step towards more accountability,” she told AFP.

Online consumer electronics sales slump

Posted on August 10, 2023 by - News

Online prices for consumer electronics have declined by 3.2 per cent year-over-year, according to a new report by Adobe Analytics.

Amazon’s Prime Day has become a benchmark for pricing fluctuations and user behaviour, providing a unique prism to observe the complicated dance of supply, demand and modern consumer psychology.

According to Adobe Analytics data, the online pricing of items across all categories declined by 3.2 per cent year-over-year in July, and by 2.1 per cent when compared to June 2023. Cheaper online costs were mostly found in non-essential items such as electronics, toys, clothes and sporting goods, which were discounted during Amazon Prime Day.

Looking at the analysis of the July 2023 data by Adobe Analytics on price fluctuations across product categories, it revealed that compared to the same month in 2022, online grocery prices increased by 6.7 per cent.

This points to a decrease from the preceding annual price rises of 8.1 per cent in June, 9.7 per cent in May and 9.1 per cent in April. The apex of online grocery price inflation was in February when prices were up by 14.2 per cent year-over-year.

On electronics, the prices dropped significantly over the past few months, culminating in July. This decline was partly catalysed by the additional discounts offered during Prime Day, rendering electronics 2.1 per cent cheaper than they were in June. As a result, electronics prices had an 11 per cent drop in July, following a 10 per cent dip in June over the same period last year.

IaaS market growing claims Gartner

Posted on July 19, 2023 by - News

Canalys Forum EuropeThe worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 29.7 per cent in 2022, to $120.3 billion, up from $92.8 billion in 2021, according to Gartner.

Amazon retained the top position in the IaaS market in 2022, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.

Gartner VP analyst Sid Nag said that Cloud had been elevated from a technology disruptor to a business disruptor.

“IaaS is driving software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) growth as buyers to continue to add more applications to the cloud and modernise existing ones.”

“IaaS growth in 2022 was stronger than expected, despite a slight softening in the fourth quarter as customers focused on using their previously committed capacity to its fullest potential,” added Nag.

“This is expected to continue until mid-2023 and is a natural outcome of the market’s maturity. We expect an acceleration in 2024, as there is still room for additional growth.”

In 2022, the top five IaaS providers accounted for over 80 per cent of the market. Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with revenue of $48.1 billion and a 40 per cent market share.

Amazon Web Services loses Chris Vonderhaar

Posted on June 5, 2023 by - Moving People, News

Amazon Web Services has lost its top cloudy executive Chris Vonderhaar who was the bloke who planned, designed and constructed AWS’ data centres.

For those who came in late, AWS datacentres power the $85bn cloud company’s infrastructure and cloud services.

Vonderhaar had been with the company for nearly 13 years in top cloud infrastructure roles and it is unclear why he has left. In 2021, it was thought that Vonderhaar would be a successor to former AWS CEO Andy Jassy, recently promoted to CEO of Amazon.

In addition to leading the Amazon subsidiary’s datacentre global strategy, Vonderhaar was responsible for business development and procurement of utility connections, the AWS renewable energy portfolio, and AWS sustainability teams and business, according to his LinkedIn profile.

UK telecoms regulator launches cloudy anti-trust investigation

Posted on April 6, 2023 by - News

UK telecoms regulator has launched a competition probe into the cloud market.

According to Ofcom, two US vendors Microsoft and Amazon enjoy a 60 per cent – 70 per cent share of the £15bn UK cloud services market.

Ofcom is proposing that the matter be referred to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for investigation.

Writing in its blog, Ofcom said that with business and the public sector ever more reliant on cloud services, this represents an imbalance that is bad for customer choice.

Nothing weird about vendor firings

Posted on April 4, 2023 by - News

Aviatrix CEO tech leader Steve Mullaney has been telling the world+dog that there is nothing unusual about the large number of layoffs that are occurring in the IT industry.

He said that a large number of sackage is due to the “overhiring” technology companies did over the past few years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mullaney said: “Everyone just kept hiring, hiring and hiring, whether it made any sense or not. There was no downside to it. And all anyone cared about was growth at any cost. Then last summer hits. All of a sudden everybody then says, ‘We’ll now, hang on. That’s not the way the world works anymore. You actually have to be profitable.’ It’s going back to what’s normal.”

He said that AWS probably hired hired tens-of-thousands of people over the last year so there is nothing wrong with AWS.

 

 

Amazon profit fall hits corporate employees

Posted on February 23, 2023 by - News

Amazon’s falling stock price means some corporate employees will see wage packets with some losing half.

Amazon pays some corporate (non-warehouse) employees “a large chunk” of their annual salaries in restricted stock units.

Because the company’s share price has taken a 35 per cent tumble this year, employees’ pay will be between 15 per cent and 50 per cent lower than Amazon’s projected targets.

Amazon’s stock price has fallen from about $150 per share in February 2022 to $97 this week.

Euro clouds missing from the sky

Posted on February 20, 2023 by - News

European players are virtually absent from the cloud market, thanks largely to bureaucracy and squabbling.

While companies have been moving to the cloud in great numbers, it has been mostly products made by US big tech. Azure was top, followed by AWS and then Google Cloud – the “big three”.

This is the last thing which should have happened. When GDPR came out in 2018 and with the collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield data transfer regulations, many predicted a golden age for European cloud companies.

Skies the limit for cloud spending

Posted on February 13, 2023 by - News

According to Synergy Research Group, fourth-quarter enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services surpassed $61 billion, a rise of 21 per cent during the same period last year.

However, the increase was substantially dampened by the strong US dollar and a severely restricted Chinese market.

Synergy said that the US Q4 growth rate was 27 per cent, which compares with an average growth rate of 31 per cent in the previous four quarters.

The market tracker explained that the shrink in growth rate was partly to be expected due to the increasingly massive scale of the market, but added there is no doubt the current economic climate also had an adverse impact.

Axeman cometh to Dell

Posted on February 7, 2023 by - News

Dell Technologies plans to slash its global workforce by 6,650 jobs which represents five per cent of its entire employee base.

For those who came in late, Big Tech has been making the short-term decision to improve their bottom lines by laying off staff as recession looms. This gives them the excellent opportunity to complain about not having skilled, loyal staff in two years or have their bottom lines handed to them by more agile companies staffed by the people they laid off.

In January SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Sophos, Amazon and Salesforce revealed that significant cuts were on the horizon, blaming the “economic downturn” with managers trotting out cliches like “economic headwinds.”