And Gartner isn’t the only one that recognizes Azure’s mass appeal: other recent research has predicted that adoption of Azure by CIOs could surpass AWS by 2019.

Like AWS, successful implementation of Azure relies on customers forming relationships with partners. But Gartner says that while Microsoft “has been aggressively recruiting managed service and professional services partners… many of these partners lack extensive experience with the Azure platform, which can compromise the quality of the solutions they deliver to customers.”

But it’s not necessarily the fault of the partners; Gartner says that “CMP vendors and MSPs report challenges in working with Azure, particularly in the areas of API reliability and secure authentication, which are slowing their ability to deliver solutions.”

Winner: Google

Google’s capabilities in the IaaS space rely heavily on its own experience running the back-end of its behemoth search engine. In other words, Google allows other companies to “run like Google” which makes it the top contender for cloud-native use cases and applications.

But Google is lacking in key areas that could prevent it from further adoption with established organizations and startups; namely, “user management suitable for large organizations, granular and customizable role-based access control (RBAC), complex network topologies equivalent to those in enterprise data centers, and software licensing via a marketplace and license-portability agreement.”

Unlike AWS and Microsoft, who have been fairly supportive of partners, Google has focused more on delivering its cloud services direct, even pushing some MSPs to vow to never work with the company.

Winner: Rackspace

With roots in OpenStack cloud, Rackspace has worked to be more technology-neutral, and shifted away from this to embrace “its roots as ‘a company of experts,’” offering managed AWS support and other managed services for third-party clouds. Rackspace is also strong when it comes to private cloud offerings.

What has held Rackspace back? According to Gartner, it has not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation of the market leaders.

Gartner also hinted that Rackspace could become an acquisition target – which was at least partially confirmed this week as reports surfaced that it is close to a deal with private equity firm Apollo.

Loser: VMware

While Gartner acknowledges that VMware is the market share leader in virtualization, vCloud Air has “limited appeal to the business managers and application development leaders who are typically the key decision makers for cloud IaaS sourcing.”

“VMware is no longer significantly expanding the geographic footprint of vCloud Air, nor investing in the engineering necessary to expand its feature set beyond basic cloud IaaS,” Gartner says.

Loser: NTT Communications

Thought NTT Communications (NTT Com) has a strong presence in Asia-Pacific – a challenging market for many IaaS providers – its basic cloud IaaS offering is not enough to set it apart from its competitors.

Gartner says it is “missing capabilities that would make it attractive to enterprise IT operations organizations” – which could be somewhat addressed by its CSB portal that includes its offerings and third-party clouds, expected to launch this year.

Loser: Fujitsu

Gartner says that Fujitsu’s cloud IaaS capabilities “lag significantly behind those of the market leaders” and “it will continue to need to aggressively invest in acquiring and building technology in order to be competitive in this market.”

Source: TheWHIR

We asked Structure Research founder and managing director Philbert Shih to provide some insight into why a company that is already public would want to go private.

“There are obvious financial benefits for management and shareholders given that a buyout typically involves a very healthy premium on the current stock price,” Shih says. “One of the primary benefits of going private is to focus on a long-term strategy and spend less time meeting quarterly expectations and complex regulatory and compliance requirements. This is a unique point in Rackspace’s history and going private will allow it to execute on some of the big decisions it has made – i.e. the shift to a managed third party cloud model – without the pressure from shareholders to hit numbers and continually drive immediate value.”

For firms like Solarwinds, going private is the best choice for future growth of the company. Solarwinds CEO Kevin Thompson told NetworkWorld earlier this year: “It is never an easy decision to go private because it’s a change in the strategy and course you were on, and ultimately you need to get 100 percent alignment with your board and your management team.”

Source: TheWHIR

READ MORE: Here’s How Much Water All US Data Centers Consume

“We definitely want our portfolio companies to be cognizant of their water use and take the appropriate steps to minimize their water use and recycle water,” said Brian Rice, portfolio manager at the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which manages about $189 billion in assets as of June 30. He cited water usage as a concern at data centers as well as at other portfolio companies, such as those in agriculture.

Golden State

California—home to companies running some of the world’s biggest data centers—houses more than 800 of the facilities, the most of any U.S. state, according to Dan Harrington, research director of 451 Research LLC, a technology consulting firm.

Water usage there is especially a concern as the state’s drought pushes into its fifth year. California Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order in May to extend statewide emergency water restrictions, establishing long-term measures to conserve water.

RELATED: Why Salesforce Bought Coolan, a Data Center Optimization Startup

The water risk to investors of California-based companies operating data centers will not affect them gradually, said Julie Gorte, senior vice president of sustainable investing at Pax World Management LLC. “It will probably come in one big splashy moment,” she said.

As a result, some sustainable-minded investors are trying to enhance their understanding of water risk before it becomes a liability, said Cate Lamb, head of water at investor environmental advocacy group CDP. The group held a series of workshops this year for investors to discuss their most crucial water reporting needs, such as isolating water risk of individual assets. The number of institutional investors committed to its water engagement program with companies has grown to 617 from 150 in 2010.

Operational efficiencies at data centers have a direct link to companies’ profitability and pose an increasing risk for investors in a “tense” climate change environment, said Himani Phadke, research director at the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a non-profit that writes corporate sustainability reporting guidelines for investors.

Companies, like investors, are trying to get ahead of the risk.

Corporate Response

Bill Weihl, director of sustainability at Facebook Inc., said the company uses a combination of fresh air and water to cool its data centers. In 2015, Facebook said it used a total of 221 million gallons of water, with 70 percent of that consumption at its data facilities. “We designed our data centers to use about half the water a typical data center uses,” he said in e-mailed answers to questions.

Around Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon, data center in particular, water efficiency has become “a big issue,” Weihl said. The center is east of the Cascade Mountains, a region that tends to be drier than western side of the state, and businesses must compete with farmers and a growing local population for water.

Weihl said rainwater capture and reuse, which is used for irrigation and toilet-flushing at the center, saves 272,000 gallons of municipally treated water per year. Facebook is also working with the City of Prineville and its engineers on the town’s water plan, which includes water mitigation and recycling “grey water” from buildings, he said.

Water consumption at eBay Inc.’s Salt Lake City-based data center rose 14 percent in 2014 to 31,354 gallons, according to the online retailer’s sustainability report, while its Phoenix facility saw usage drop 3 percent to 57,421 gallons. A company spokeswoman declined to comment.

Google declined to say how much water the company’s data centers use, but said that the company redesigns its cooling technology on average about every 12 to 18 months. The company has also designed data centers that use air instead of water for cooling, it said.

“There is no ‘one size fits all’ model — each data center is designed for the highest performance and highest efficiency for that specific location and we’re always testing new technologies to further our commitment to efficiency and environmental responsibility,” vice president of data center operations Joe Kava said in an e-mail adapted from an earlier blog post.

Growing Issue

The environmental impact of data centers is poised to grow as the world produces more data each day. Carbon emissions from data centers already represent 0.2 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions, compared to 0.6 percent for airlines, according to a 2010 McKinsey & Co. report. And more companies are developing larger data centers as they transition to cloud computing, increasing the demand for water needed for cooling their data servers, said Pax World’s Gorte.

The need to boost water unit efficiency at data centers is driving some companies to open up locations near water sources and cooler climates. Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, for example, began operations at its overseas data center in Lulea, Sweden in 2013 near the Arctic Circle. Mountain View, California-based Google operates a total of 15 data centers with four located in northern Europe.

Investor concern about corporate water use will only continue to grow, said William Sarni, director and practice leader of Water Strategy at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

“Over the past few years, we have seen a dramatic increase of interest in water as a business risk and also as a business opportunity issue,” said Sarni. “I see it accelerating.”

Source: TheWHIR

The increasing influence of markets and developers in the Eastern hemisphere, where Android leads iOS significantly, could be part of the reason for the shift. The end of the conflict between Google and Oracle over their Android java development kits very late 2015 may also have had an effect.

In addition to mobile platforms, the report focuses on desktop and cloud developer “tribes,” the IoT market, and the new technologies attracting developer attention.

Among Windows classic developers, 36 percent primarily use C# for cloud development, as opposed to only 2 percent of Linux-first developers and 3 percent of macOS developers, according to the report.

SEE ALSO: Cloud: Understanding Sizing and Capacity Requirements Driven by IoT

The ratio of new IoT developers fell drastically from half a year ago to 22 percent, after falling somewhat from Q2 2015 to Q4 2105, from 57 to 47 percent, respectively. The main target of IoT developers is the Smart Home, which was also the fastest growing IoT application, up by 6 to 48 percent. Ericsson has estimated that there will be 3 billion IoT devices in North America alone by 2021, which represents a lot of work for developers.

RELATED: Bsquare’s IoT Software Stack Helps Developers Link Devices to the AWS Cloud

The next big thing, judging by developer interest, is data science and machine learning, which 41 percent are involved with in some way, one-third of those professionally. Just under one-quarter of developers are working with augmented and virtual reality, mostly as a hobby or side-project.

Source: TheWHIR

Over the past two years under a new CEO, Rackspace has expanded its portfolio to include support and managed services for some of the most popular public clouds, including AWS. This strategy has helped it appeal to new customers and extend its reach beyond web hosting.

According to a report by Market Realist earlier this week, “Rackspace’s increased customer signing from AWS is an encouraging sign, considering Amazon rules the cloud space with a 31 percent market share. Moreover, its deal with Microsoft’s Azure is also beneficial for the company, as Microsoft is rapidly making its presence felt in the cloud space.”

Source: TheWHIR

“A bargained-for exchange of information for service is a perfectly acceptable and widely used model throughout the U.S. economy, including the Internet ecosystem, and is consistent with decades of legal precedent and policy goals related to consumer protection and privacy,” Comcast wrote to the FCC. The company also claims that blocking its plan “would harm consumers by, among other things, depriving them of lower-priced offerings.”

AT&T is already using this model to charge users of its gigabit broadband service a $30 (or more) add-on charge to opt out of a tracking program called, without any obvious irony in the promotional material, “Internet Preferences.”

In the most recent Who Has Your Back report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which measures the privacy practices of major internet companies and service providers, Comcast earned three out of a possible five stars. The report recommends Comcast adopt a stronger policy around providing users with notice about government data requests.

Source: TheWHIR