Tag: Google

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.

Microsoft and Google rake in billions in AI craze

Posted on January 31, 2024 by - News

Tech giants Microsoft and Google have splashed out on generative AI, with their cloud computing arms seeing a surge in demand as clients fork out for the pricey computing power that fuels the technology.

Microsoft has raced ahead in the AI game, pumping money into ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and pushing AI across products while others lag.

The company said sales soared to $62 billion for the October to December period, up 18 percent year-on-year and above the $61.1 billion expected by analysts.

The AI frenzy has helped Microsoft overtake Apple as the world’s biggest company by market value at more than three trillion dollars. The company’s share price is up  70 per cent from a year ago.

Microsoft’ resident Software King of the World Satya Nadella said  “We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale.”

Microsoft dodges EU rules for its search engine and browser

Posted on January 25, 2024 by - News

Microsoft’s search engine Bing, browser Edge, and advertising services might be spared from Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation.

In 2022, the European Commission named the world’s most notorious tech giants, including Microsoft, as internet “gatekeepers,” who would be subject to special rules.

The DMA, which has been in force since November 2022, was meant to protect consumers while giving rivals more chances to survive against big tech companies.

Microsoft’s widely used services such as Windows, Bing search and the Edge browser came under the eagle eye of European antitrust regulators. As a result, the Redmond-based tech giant was added to the gatekeepers list.

Last year, both Apple and Microsoft tried to get iMessage and Bing off the EU’s tech gatekeepers list, with Microsoft arguing their platforms had neither hit the set thresholds nor attained the size to qualify as a gatekeeper.

Google loves Herts

Posted on January 23, 2024 by - News

Search engine outfit Google has invested £800 million in a new data centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, to boost its cloud and AI capabilities across the UK.

The tech giant has bragged that the 33-acre site will create jobs for the locals, who will be thrilled to have a massive power-hungry facility in their backyard.

The new data centre will give businesses nationwide more computing power. They can use Google’s AI tools and cloud services if they can afford it.

Google has also claimed that it cares about the environment and has set a target to run all its data centres and offices on green energy by 2030.

To help with this, Google signed a deal with ENGIE for wind power from Scotland’s Moray West farm, which will start in 2022.

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.

Google slashes jobs within its recruiting organisation

Posted on September 15, 2023 by - News

Search engine outfit  Google is cutting hundreds of jobs within its recruiting organisation as it pulls back on hiring.

Google spokesperson, Courtenay Mencini said that the company will still recruit top engineering and technical talent but has meaningfully slowed the pace of its overall hiring. As a result, it does not need so many recruiters.

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.

Microsoft makes Office concessions to AWS

Posted on August 7, 2023 by - News

Software King of the World, Microsoft is granting customers with specific licenses the power to run Office products within an AWS cloud.

This partially reverses a policy change made in 2019, which required customers with perpetual licenses to purchase new licenses if they wanted to run those applications on AWS, Google Cloud or Alibaba clouds.

Microsoft is the UK’s third largest cloud provider and so this has made it a target of a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  In the complaint Google accused Microsoft of using its dominant position to trap customers into contracts within its Azure cloud server business.

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.

Google orders staff back to work

Posted on June 12, 2023 by - News

Search engine outfit Google has reversed its decision on working from home and wants its employees back in the office to listen to its managers in long pointless meetings about moving cheese, kicking the ball running, and leveraging things,

Google was one of the first large tech companies to allow its employees to voluntarily work from home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  But now it wants its employees to return to the office at least part-time.

Google updated its hybrid work policy by requiring most employees to physically come to the company’s offices at least three days a week and it will be tracking attendance via office badges, and including office attendance as part of its employee reviews.

As part of its updated hybrid work policy, Google is also requesting those employees who previously had approval to work from home to reconsider coming to the office on a hybrid work schedule to be “better connected to the Google community.”

Employees who were pre-approved to work from home full time may find that approval rescinded.

 

Cohesity teams up with Google cloud

Posted on May 24, 2023 by - News

Security outfit Cohesity has announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to help organisations unlock the power of generative AI and data.

Cohesity also unveiled Cohesity Turing, a unique, comprehensive, and rapidly evolving set of AI technologies that brings the power of AI to data security and management.

The company said the expanded partnership with Google Cloud and Cohesity Turing will enable organisations to leverage their entire data estate through a single, secure workflow across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments.

Cohesity wants to extend its AI-ready data security and management platform — Cohesity Data Cloud — to work closely and have deeper integrations with leading cloud services, including Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s fully managed ML (machine learning) platform designed to help companies to accelerate the deployment of ML and AI models.

It believes that combining Cohesity’s data security and management capabilities and Vertex AI will enable joint customers to gain new insights into the same data they’re already securing and managing on Cohesity’s platform. Through this integration, customers couldquickly search across exabytes of data to gain insights into data patterns, like finding anomalies in their data to detect threats, or find answers to very specific questions, or quickly recover data using contextual searches.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that Vertex AI was one of the best platforms for building, deploying, managing and scaling ML models – and we’re excited that Cohesity is joining our growing open ecosystem to help more customers get value from their data via AI.

“Cohesity’s excellent data security and management capabilities, combined with Google Cloud’s powerful generative AI and analytics capabilities, will help customers get exceptional insights into their backup and archived data.”

Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen said businesses need to be able to easily get rapid insights from their data utilising cutting-edge and leading AI/ML models.

“We agree with Google that AI must be handled securely and responsibly. With our unique platform, Cohesity not only provides phenomenal search via our built-in indexing capabilities, but robust security protocols to help customers maintain control and privacy of their data at every turn.”
Creating Unprecedented Efficiency and Insights Via Cohesity Turing

Adding AI to Snapchat might be a disaster

Posted on May 2, 2023 by - News

Companies hoping to push AI as a product enhancement should take a step or two of caution as new figures show that it might cost Snapchat a lot of customers.

Searches for ‘delete Snapchat’ exploded 488 per cent as controversial My AI feature is introduced to every account.

Cyber security consultants CloudTech24 found that online interest in the term ‘delete Snapchat’ has skyrocketed over five times the average in the last three months. Searches for ‘how to delete Snapchat account’ have also risen 70 per cent worldwide over the last week, and the hashtag #SnapchatAI currently has over 180 million views on TikTok.

Managed services deals increase in size and value

Posted on April 25, 2023 by - News

Managed services contact deals fell in 2022 but the average deal size grew by 22 per cent, according to IDC beancounters.

The number crunchers said that there were more than 1,700 managed services deals signed last year worth more than $125 billion in contract value.

The research firm reports that despite indications of a global economic slowdown, IT spending across organisations is steadily increasing.

There was an increase in larger deal signings (total contract value (TCV) above $100 million) in 2022 compared to 2021.

IDC said that as technology is increasingly becoming the backbone of organisational growth strategies, they are seeing more and more organisations upgrading their IT infrastructure leveraging cloud, artificial intelligence, and security.

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.