Tag: AWS

AWS and Slack take on Microsoft

Posted on June 9, 2020 by - News

AWS and Slack have united in a project to take on Microsoft Teams.

The multi-year deal will see Slack migrate all of its audio and video call capabilities to Amazon’s Chime platform, which competes with the likes of WebEx and Zoom. Slack already used AWS as its “preferred cloud partner”.

Under the deal Slack will pay AWS at least $425 million for hosting between now and May 2025

AWS will adopt Slack internally as part of the deal, and encourage developers to manage their AWS environments on Slack’s messaging platform.

Outfits ignoring the cloud are defying gravity

Posted on May 18, 2020 by - News

Companies which ignore the cloud are trying to defy gravity, according to AWS’s CEO of Amazon Web Services.

At  the vendor’s online Summit event, Andy Jassy said he understood why some organisations are wary of a cloud move, but that they will be at a competitive disadvantage if they don’t.

“There is still a segment of companies trying to fight gravity and they argue that they can still do the infrastructure less expensively than can be done in the cloud or that they have enough services to allow their organisation to move as quickly as people can in the cloud. We’ve done many thousands of these comparisons over the years and I don’t think I’ve yet seen a company that can move at the cost structure and the pace of changing their customer experience that they can in AWS and in the cloud.”

Red Hat and AWS extend partnership

Posted on May 15, 2020 by - News

Red Hat and AWS  have extended their partnership to deliver Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly-managed and jointly-supported enterprise Kubernetes service on AWS.

Red Hat, vice president Sathish Balakrishnan, said Amazon Red Hat OpenShift will be a fully managed service that enables IT organisations to more quickly build and deploy applications in AWS on Red Hat’s powerful, enterprise Kubernetes platform, using the same tools and APIs.

“Developers will be able to build containerised applications that integrate natively with the more than 170+ integrated AWS cloud-native services to enhance agility, innovation and scalability. By blending Red Hat’s and AWS’ decades of enterprise IT knowledge and experience into Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, IT organizations will be able to launch cloud-native systems that can retain enterprise-grade security, be more agile and see improved performance while driving cost efficiencies”, he said.

Amazon Red Hat OpenShift will offer customers the ability to launch Red Hat OpenShift clusters and provide the benefit of an AWS integrated experience for cluster creation and management, AWS Console listing, on-demand (hourly) billing model, single invoice for AWS deployments and the ability to contact AWS for support.

SCC provides help to Cambridge University Hospitals

Posted on April 21, 2020 by - News

SCC has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) launch a free national PPE training website amid the on-going COVID-19 outbreak.

CUH needed to quickly provide critical training on how to correctly put on and remove Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to protect them from contracting and spreading the virus. A new website was built prior to lockdown measures being implemented in the UK, hosted locally.

The website is a resource for the whole of the NHS on the practical aspects of PPE, developed in collaboration with experts in infectious diseases at CUH. To launch the website as quickly as possible, CUH asked SCC for support in architecting and deploying the infrastructure required to host this website in AWS.

AWS deepens Salesforce partnership

Posted on November 20, 2019 by - News

AWS has announced Salesforce will be offering AWS telephony and call transcription services with Amazon Connect as part of its Service Cloud call centre solution.

Patrick Beyries, VP of product management for Service Cloud said: “We have a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services, which will allow customers to purchase Amazon Connect from us, and then it will be pre-integrated and out of the box to provide a full transcription of the call, and of course that’s alongside an actual call recording of the call.”

Cloud infrastructure services market soars

Posted on November 1, 2019 by - News

The worldwide cloud infrastructure services market increased by 37 percent  in the third quarter, according to beancounters at Canalys.

As you might expect AWS was at the top, followed by Microsoft Azure then Google Cloud.

Canalys research analyst Daniel Liu said that a lot of customers were using a mixture of providers to house their data and applications the analyst house is arguing that the big cloud providers need to make sure they have a decent network of channel relationships to reach the largest number of customers.

AWS growth slows

Posted on July 29, 2019 by - News

Amazon’s cloudy business seems to have skipped a beat as the outfit fell short of what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.

The retail giant’s net sales increased 20 percent year on year to $63.4 billion for the three months ending 30 June 2019.

The revenue figure beat market expectations, but its growth figure fell short of what analysts had predicted.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud business, generated revenue of $8.3 billion in the quarter, up 37per cent on the same period last year, but falling slightly short of analyst expectations.

Gartner roasts big cloud

Posted on July 25, 2019 by - News

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 growing

Posted on April 11, 2019 by - News

Google Cloud appears to be growing fast and while AWS is still king, it is growing slower than the search engine outfit.

Beancounters at Canalys said that Google Cloud was the fastest growing cloud infrastructure provider in 2018, besting market leaders Amazon and Microsoft.

CDW winner on UK government’s G-cloud

Posted on January 29, 2019 by - News

CDW transacted the most sales of any reseller on the G-Cloud framework last year according to government released figures

The figures, published by Crown Commercial Service (CCS), reveal that CDW raked in sales of £29.3 million via G-Cloud, although the vast majority of this came from one huge £25.7 million deal.

CloudHealth and Softcat team up on cloud

Posted on December 11, 2018 by - News

CloudHealth and Softcat have announced a new partnership.

The pair say that Softcat’s Cloud Intelligence Service, powered by CloudHealth, will bring enhanced visibility into public cloud environments, offering greater insight into spend, usage, and identifying efficiencies across all cloud platforms.

CloudHealth and Softcat will generate automated reports on all of an organisation’s public cloud usage, in Microsoft Azure

AWS is marching on

Posted on July 30, 2018 by - News

Amazon Web Services’ revenue jumped by nearly half in Q2 and increased its market share over Microsoft and Google.

For the three months ending 30 June, AWS revenue increased 48 percent year on year to $6.1 billion and operating profit rose 79 percent to $1.6 billion.

Amazon’s CFO Brian Olsavsky said he expects AWS’ growth to continue as a result of a strong pipeline.

“We’re very happy with the results we’re seeing, the backlog that we see, the new contracts and new customers, and the expansion of existing customer business that we see”, he said.

“The business has accelerated in the last three quarters, and we’re seeing great signs in a number of areas.

“Customers are just branching out to a lot of new products from us. There are new areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, serverless computing and database and analytics [that] are really big.”

Rubrik scores AWS recognition

Posted on July 19, 2018 by - News

rub5_1Cloud Data Management outfit Rubrik has obtained Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Competency. This means that the outfit can provide technology to help customers work on AWS.

This moves Rubrick up the AWS greasy pole in the AWS Partner Network (APN) particularly in the Backup & Recovery and Archive area.  To achieve the AWS Storage Competency, APN Technology Partners must also deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS.

Rubrik Vice President, Business Development Ranajit Nevatia said that the move underscores the companies technical knowledge of AWS and track-record  of delivering customer success

“Our goal is to provide enterprises with a simpler, faster and future-proof cloud data management solution.”

Rubrik’s platform now supports multiple AWS storage classes for  Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (Amazon S3 Standard -IA), and Amazon Glacier.

Rubrik’s platform lets both commercial businesses and government agencies to securely manage data from creation to expiration with end-to-end encryption. Rubrik supports AWS GovCloud and government infrastructure offerings from AWS, including advanced secure services like Commercial Cloud Services (C2S).

 

Gartner purges half of cloud service providers from Magic Quadrant

Posted on June 1, 2018 by - News

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.

 

UK first to see VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnership

Posted on March 9, 2018 by - News

krayVMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have launched their European partnership and the UK the first market to go live.

VMware Cloud on AWS was first announced in 2016 and puts VMware’s private cloud available on AWS’ public cloud infrastructure. It has been kicking around the US since last year, and the UK is the second market to see it.

It gives VMware partners the ability themselves to extend using native AWS service capabilities. So far two partners have signed up for the programme, one of which is Softcat.

The launch sees VMware expand its Solution Provider and Cloud Provider programmes to include VMware Cloud on AWS, and release a new competency for the service.

VMware said that its partnership with AWS shows its belief that there is “no question” hybrid cloud will ultimately rule.

AWS that the public cloud vendor expects the “vast majority” of workloads to run in the public cloud eventually.

VMware Cloud for AWS will soon be available in other European markets, with a launch in Germany set to take place soon.