Hyperscale Operators Continue Ramping Up Share Of Cloud Markets

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that hyperscale operators are aggressively growing their share of key cloud service markets, which are themselves growing at impressive rates. Synergy’s new research has identified 24 companies that meet its definition of hyperscale, and in 2016 those companies in aggregate accounted for 68% of the cloud infrastructure services market (IaaS, PaaS, private hosted cloud services) and 59% of the SaaS market. In 2012 those hyperscale operators accounted for just 47% of each of those markets. Hyperscale operators typically have hundreds of thousands of servers in their data center networks, while the largest, such as Amazon and Google, have millions of servers.

In aggregate those 24 hyperscale operators now have almost 320 large data centers in their networks, with many of them having substantial infrastructure in multiple countries. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM. Each has 45 or more data center locations with at least two in each of the four regions (North America, APAC, EMEA, and Latin America). The scale of infrastructure investment required to be a leading player in cloud services or cloud-enabled services means that few companies are able to keep pace with the hyperscale operators, and they continue to both increase their share of service markets and account for an ever-larger portion of spend on data center infrastructure equipment — servers, storage, networking, network security, and associated software.

“Hyperscale operators are now dominating the IT landscape in so many different ways,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group. “They are reshaping the services market, radically changing IT spending patterns within enterprises, and causing major disruptions among infrastructure technology vendors. Our latest forecasts show these factors being accentuated over the next five years.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

ViaWest Adds Cloud Node To Colorado Data Center

Bringing clients closer to their customers, ViaWest launched a new cloud node in the Colorado region, enabling Rocky Mountain users to access applications more efficiently.

 “The speed that applications can be accessed can have a very real impact on the bottom line,” said Michele Corvino, director of product management for ViaWest. “This cloud node enables our clients to place their applications closer to their users in the Rocky Mountain region so they can deliver service excellence to their internal and external customers.”

Hosted from the ViaWest Compark Data Center, the cloud node brings lower latency, premium connectivity and advanced hardware for clients serving the Rocky Mountain region. Cloud solutions include private, public and compliant clouds, disaster recovery, and managed services for public hyperscale cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

“This cloud node enables our clients to achieve speed, scale and efficiency and is connected to our network of cloud nodes and data centers located across the country by our high speed national backbone,” said Gunnar Stinnett, vice president of sales for the Rocky Mountain Region. “This investment enhances our ongoing commitment to serving clients in our home state of Colorado.”

ViaWest operates and manages five data centers in Colorado, offering a combined raised floor capacity of over 278,000 sq ft. The Compark Data Center opened in Centennial in 2014 and is among the most innovative and efficient in the data center industry, with a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.3 and power density capabilities of more than 1,500 watts per sq ft.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending Forecast To Grow 1.4% In 2017

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.5 trillion in 2017, a 1.4% increase from 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. This growth rate is down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 2.7%, due in part to the rising U.S. dollar (Table 1.)

“The strong U.S. dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.”

The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services, and telecom markets. For more than a decade, global IT and business executives have been using these highly anticipated quarterly reports to recognize market opportunities and challenges, and base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies rather than guesswork.

The data center system segment is expected to grow 0.3% in 2017. While this is up from negative growth in 2016, the segment is experiencing a slowdown in the server market. “We are seeing a shift in who is buying servers and who they are buying them from,” said Lovelock. “Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data center system segment.”

Driven by strength in mobile phone sales and smaller improvements in sales of printers, PCs and tablets, worldwide spending on devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) is projected to grow 1.7% in 2017, to reach $645 billion. This is up from negative 2.6% growth in 2016. Mobile phone growth in 2017 will be driven by increased average selling prices (ASPs) for phones in emerging Asia/Pacific and China, together with iPhone replacements and the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. The tablet market continues to decline significantly, as replacement cycles remain extended and both sales and ownership of desktop PCs and laptops are negative throughout the forecast. Through 2017, business Windows 10 upgrades should provide underlying growth, although increased component costs will see PC prices increase.

The 2017 worldwide IT services market is forecast to grow 2.3% in 2017, down from 3.6% growth in 2016. The modest changes to the IT services forecast this quarter can be characterized as adjustments to particular geographies as a result of potential changes of direction anticipated regarding U.S. policy — both foreign and domestic. The business-friendly policies of the new U.S. administration are expected to have a slightly positive impact on the U.S. implementation service market as the U.S. government is expected to significantly increase its infrastructure spending during the next few years.

Gartner’s IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on rigorous analysis of sales by thousands of vendors across the entire range of IT products and services. Gartner uses primary research techniques, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a comprehensive database of market size data on which to base its forecast.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Unitas Global Collaborates With Equinix And Microsoft Azure™

Unitas Global has announced a strategic partnership with Equinix and Microsoft Azure™ to deliver an end-to-end hybrid cloud solution that enables enterprises to consume public and private cloud services with full transparency and ease. Combining Unitas Global’s expertise in designing, deploying, and managing hybrid cloud solutions, Equinix’s data center and interconnection services, and Microsoft’s Azure public cloud, the enterprise solution delivers application enablement and multi-cloud orchestration capabilities, as well as extensive global reach enabling connectivity into any market.

In a recent survey, Right Scale found hybrid cloud to be the preferred enterprise strategy in 2017. Of the enterprises, they surveyed who have a strategy to use multiple clouds, the majority plan to use hybrid this year. The partnership between Unitas Global, Equinix, and Microsoft Azure eliminates the common challenges the enterprises face associated with designing, deploying, and managing hybrid cloud solutions, including security, connectivity, scale, and management of multiple cloud and infrastructure providers, simplifying the process for the enterprise customers.

“The partnership between Unitas, Equinix, and Microsoft Azure creates the optimal trifecta for a successful enterprise hybrid cloud solution: global reach, multi-cloud orchestration, and end-to-end management and provisioning,” says Patrick Shutt, CEO, Unitas Global.  “Unitas works hand-in-hand with customers to design secure, easy-to-consume hybrid cloud solutions that are fully managed and monitored 24x7x365.”

The enterprise hybrid cloud solution leverages Equinix’s global footprint of 150 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers and interconnection capabilities to enable end users to deploy performance-driven, mission-critical applications in any market around the world.

“As a longtime partner of Unitas Global and one of the first data center providers to offer direct and private interconnection to Microsoft Azure via Microsoft ExpressRoute on Equinix Cloud Exchange™, Equinix is an ideal partner for end-to-end hybrid cloud solutions,” says Greg Adgate, vice president of global technology partners and alliances.  “Our real-time interconnection capabilities and global footprint of best-in-class data centers spanning 21 countries and 41 business metros enable enterprise customers to accelerate their hybrid cloud strategies on a global scale.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

451 Releases Cloud Transformation Study

According to recent results of 451’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation study, 80% of organizations polled report that their IT environments require moderate or significant transformation to meet business requirements over the next five years, involving migrating workloads to the cloud and keeping cloud spending on an upward trend.

The latest survey finds that 22% of enterprises have adopted a ‘cloud first’ approach and infrastructure as a service (IaaS)/public cloud is the fastest-growing cloud model. With organizations increasingly choosing IaaS for mission-critical applications, service provider selection is a critical part of digital transformation. However, the respondents indicate concern about service providers’ perceived ability to align IT and business requirements, noting that there is scope for a better understanding of the customers’ businesses to support IT service delivery.

“As organizations implement IT transformation in earnest, they are increasingly relying on strategic partners for operational assistance. Those IaaS service providers who position infrastructure and technological innovation alongside meeting business requirements will be best positioned to capitalize on this market opportunity,” said Melanie Posey, research vice president and lead analyst for 451’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation service.

Survey respondents rated their IaaS providers on a range of attributes prior to purchase (promise) and after implementation (fulfillment). IaaS providers received consistently high ratings on both the promise and fulfillment of service attributes such as uptime/performance, security and technical expertise. Although these are table stakes requirements, they are also make-or-break factors that can adversely affect brand reputation. 

However, highlighting the importance of the overall customer experience, 451 Research’s survey found that organizations gave IaaS providers lower ratings on service-delivery factors such as understanding business requirements, multi-cloud/hybrid cloud support and enterprise-level customer support.

451 Research’s IaaS Vendor Window underscores AWS’s dominant market position because it outpaced competitors on multiple promise and fulfillment rating attributes, most notably breadth of services/features, brand/reputation, technical expertise and innovation. Of respondents surveyed, 55.8% are using AWS for IaaS. 

However, for the first time, AWS’s customer ratings fell behind those of other IaaS providers on ‘value for money/cost,’ where Google Cloud Platform was rated highest, and ‘understands my business,’ where IBM/SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure obtained higher scores. 

Many organizations use multiple IaaS providers and Microsoft Azure is emerging as a formidable challenger, closing the market adoption gap with AWS. While AWS remains the top pick as respondents’ most important IaaS provider (39%), nearly 35% of respondents named Microsoft their most important IaaS provider, up from 20.2% in the previous survey. 

Microsoft is also closing the customer perceptions gap with AWS, posting slightly above-average scores for overall promise and fulfillment, as does Google Cloud Platform, which secured particularly strong marks for service reliability and value for money/cost. Google and Microsoft are seeing higher overall adoption rates since the previous survey in Q1 2015.

Commenting on Microsoft’s position, Posey added, “It will be interesting to assess the impact of Azure Stack (scheduled for launch by mid-2017) on Microsoft’s overall positioning and individual attribute ratings for multi-cloud/hybrid support, as well as technical expertise and innovation.”

Among the European respondents surveyed, Microsoft emerged as the predominant primary IaaS provider, with 43.7% of European respondents citing it vs. 32% naming AWS. Microsoft’s efforts to address European customers’ data sovereignty concerns no doubt contributed to its elevated positioning in the region. 

Source: CloudStrategyMag

DXC Technology To Extend Microsoft Advance Azure Services

DXC Technology has announced that it will extend its current portfolio of offerings for Microsoft Azure with a hybrid cloud solution from its data centers based on the Microsoft Azure Stack. This new offering, DXC Services for Azure, provides business clients with a consistent and flexible platform for enterprise workloads across both private infrastructure and the Azure public cloud.

DXC and Microsoft will enable a common experience and consistent service management of Azure services across private DXC data centers and Microsoft public cloud. DXC Services for Azure will create a significantly more efficient and simplified path for clients to realize the benefits of public and hybrid cloud, and will ensure streamlined access to Azure services across both the Microsoft public cloud and DXC private data centers, complemented by a comprehensive set of managed services. DXC will train and certify thousands of consultants and developers on Azure in support of this initiative.

As traditional hosting and outsourcing services give way to the new hybrid cloud operating model, businesses need a cloud platform with a common operating model that can be consistently delivered across all deployment architectures, from traditional infrastructure to public cloud. To unlock value and provide clients a full set of solutions to meet their digital transformation needs. DXC and Microsoft will offer clients a comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft solutions, including Azure, Secure Productive Enterprise, Windows 10, Office 365, and Dynamics 365.

Today’s announcement strengthens the strategic partnership between the companies that builds on over 50 years of combined Microsoft relationships with CSC and HPE Enterprise Services. Together, DXC and Microsoft will co-invest in both the DXC Services for Azure as well as with DXC clients to accelerate their transition to public and hybrid cloud.

“DXC is building on CSC’s and HPE’s strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate our clients’ adoption of cloud services,” said Mike Lawrie, DXC Technology chairman, president, and CEO. “The result is DXC Services for Azure, a hybrid cloud offering which extends across Azure’s hyper-scale public cloud and private cloud. It facilitates real benefits, such as allowing clients to choose the right infrastructure landing zone for their workloads, all operated in a uniformly managed and consistent cloud platform.”

DXC will offer services based on Microsoft Azure Stack when the solution is released later this year. Because DXC Services for Azure offers true consistency across Microsoft Azure environments, it will be especially attractive to organizations that want a uniform programming and deployment model that effectively addresses regulatory requirements, data residency concerns, latency, and custom functionality demands. A consistent cloud platform means that applications, processes and skills can be equally applied without cumbersome translation between environments — paving the way for true acceleration of the cloud IT revolution.

“At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” said Nadella. “Pursuing this mission means forging strong partnerships with leading organizations like DXC. We look forward to helping accelerate our mutual customers’ digital transformations and empowering them to seize all of the opportunities ahead.”

DXC-Microsoft Strategic Alliance

The DXC Technology and Microsoft global strategic partnership offers clients the integrated and innovative solutions they need to succeed in a cloud-first world. Informed by its 30-plus year strategic relationship with Microsoft and recognized internationally as a key Microsoft alliance, DXC builds on Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to do more and achieve more. Together, DXC and Microsoft help organizations worldwide transform their IT and business processes to drive success orchestrated by the cloud.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Enter Cloud Suite Now Available On The Megaport Software Defined Network

Enter has announced a collaboration with Megaport (USA) Inc., a subsidiary of Megaport Limited (“Megaport”), the global leader in software defined networking (SDN), that enables near-instant, readily-available access to its Enter Cloud Suite (ECS) and services ecosystem through Megaport’s global elastic interconnection network. Enterprise and carrier customers connected to the Megaport network in Amsterdam as well as any other Megaport-enabled locations can now directly connect to Enter’s innovative cloud platform and tap into Megaport’s global footprint.

“Megaport’s Software Defined Network enables us to extend direct connectivity to our cloud services beyond Milan, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam to address increasing customer demand for network and cloud services across Europe and beyond,” said Milko Ilari, head of International Business & Strategy, Enter. “The relationship also enables automated provisioning to Enter Cloud Suite via dedicated connections from any Megaport-enabled data center.”

Enter Cloud Suite is the first European, OpenStack-based cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. ECS enables seamless orchestration of servers, storage, networks, domain name system (DNS) and content delivery network (CDN) through an intuitive graphical interface or advanced application program interface (API). The highly available, resilient and scalable offering can be delivered autonomously or as a fully managed, turnkey solution that encompasses architecting, design, setup, migration, and ongoing maintenance and support.

Wholly owned and operated, and built upon secure open source technology, Enter Cloud Suite is compliant with European data protection and privacy legislation. This is a key reason why Enter Cloud Suite is one of the official cloud platforms of 52 European institutions and agencies, such as the European Parliament and Court of Justice.

“As the demand for scalable and reliable connectivity to cloud solutions grows, Megaport is excited to enable innovative providers such as Enter, who wish to provide their customers the best connectivity capabilities. In addition to instantly managing their connectivity to ECS from any Megaport-enabled location, on any device, Enter customers can now consume elastic bandwidth for connectivity across the globe, enabling the customer to adjust the bandwidth consumption as their business requirements change,” adds Belle Lajoie, executive vice president, Asia Pacific, Megaport. “Megaport’s Software Defined Network also enables direct, instant, and scalable access to our global Ecosystem of service providers, as well as connectivity to critical Internet Exchange services throughout Europe.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Informatica Positioned As A Leader In 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant For iPaaS

Informatica® has announced that Gartner, Inc. has, for the fourth consecutive year, positioned Informatica as a Leader in its March 2017 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Worldwide. In the newest report, Informatica is positioned the highest on the ability to execute axis and farthest on the completeness of vision axis.

The complete report, including the quadrant graphic, was published on March 30, and is available here.

According to the new Gartner report: “For many, the reality of cloud is here. Application portfolios are hybrid, with many organizations having to integrate between these diverse endpoints.”

In the report, “Gartner estimates that the enterprise iPaaS market continued to expand notably during 2016, approaching $700 million in revenue and growing around 60% in terms of providers’ subscription revenue when compared to 2015.”

The new report also observes that, “Other powerful drivers for enterprise iPaaS adoption will be mobile app integration and API publishing and management, which will create a growing overlap of, and convergence with, API management and mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) offerings. We expect that iPaaS adoption will also be driven by IoT requirements (although at a later stage), which will determine some degree of functional overlap and create a demand for integration within emerging IoT platforms.”

“Informatica has been a pioneer in the iPaaS market and is innovating faster than ever,” said Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, data integration, Big Data and cloud, Informatica. “Informatica iPaaS addresses the challenges integration experts and citizen integrators face in adopting cloud and hybrid environments. Informatica iPaaS helps solve data integration, B2B integration, application integration, API creation and management, IoT, MDM, data quality and data security. We are proud to offer an intelligent, secure and trusted platform to help our customers in their strategic journeys to the cloud.”

The Informatica Cloud® market leading iPaaS delivers the broadest set of cloud integration/iPaaS capabilities on a single platform for connecting, integrating, synchronizing, cleansing and relating data across all systems, in the cloud or on-premise. Informatica is a pioneer in cloud data integration and now more than 600 billion transactions are processed with Informatica Cloud per month, demonstrating the growth in workloads shifting to the cloud and driving today’s hybrid cloud era. Customers depend on Informatica Cloud to underpin such key use cases as SaaS integration, cloud analytics and data warehousing, hybrid cloud management, application integration and data management across multiple types of environments, all powered by Informatica’s iPaaS platform.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Cisco Ends 2016 On Collaboration Market High

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that collaboration market leader Cisco grew its market share for the third consecutive quarter, passing the 15% mark in the final three months of the year. Microsoft too saw a sequential uptick in its market share but remained more than two and a half percentage points behind its big rival. Avaya continued to battle with IBM for third place in the market, with IBM coming out on top in the fourth quarter but Avaya having the lead for full-year 2016. Cisco’s market share growth in Q4 was thanks in large part to achieving a five-year market share high in premise-based solutions while holding its own in the much higher growth hosted/cloud market segments. Microsoft continues to hold a strong lead in hosted/cloud collaboration, but this side of the market is more fragmented with no single supplier achieving a double-digit market share, in contrast to the on-premise market. Beyond the top four vendors, other major players in the market include AT&T, Verizon, Citrix, Polycom, Mitel, UNIFY and ALE.

Total revenues from collaboration — which includes enterprise voice, UC applications, telepresence, email software, enterprise content management, enterprise social networks, and a range of hosted/cloud communications and applications — again topped the $9 billion mark and were close to their all-time high. Revenues from hosted/cloud solutions continue to grow strongly — up 9% in 2016 compared with 2015 — while revenue from premise-based systems declined 4%. During the quarter particularly strong growth was seen in teamwork applications, contact center as a service (CCaaS), and video as a service (VaaS). Teamwork applications is an emerging and super-high growth area that features Cisco’s Spark and vendors like Slack. Strong market demand for CCaaS drove strong growth for such vendors as Genesys/Interactive Intelligence, inContact and Five9; while increased market adoption for VaaS drove strong growth and continued attention to vendors such as Zoom and BlueJeans.

“Collaboration continues to be a somewhat fragmented market that is characterized by a long list of disruptive and high-growth companies, with no less than 15 companies achieving full-year growth rates in excess of 20%,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “That level of growth is certainly not matched by the market leaders, with the top 10 companies in aggregate seeing their revenues actually decline somewhat in 2016. Looking ahead we see that new cloud-based applications will continue to disrupt traditional business communication systems, creating strong opportunity for new cloud based solutions.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

AWS Direct Connect Service Now Available At Equinix In Munich

Equinix, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect cloud service in its Munich International Business Exchange (IBX®) data centers. With AWS Direct Connect, companies can connect their customer-owned and managed infrastructure directly to AWS, establishing a private connection to the cloud that can reduce costs, increase performance, and deliver a more consistent network experience. The Munich data center is Equinix’s second location in Germany to offer AWS Direct Connect. The company announced availability in Frankfurt in 2014. Munich brings the total number of Equinix metros offering the Direct Connect service to 14, globally.

“We are thrilled to be adding another AWS Direct Connect site in our European footprint of data centers. It has always been our goal to help enterprises realize the full benefits of the cloud, while alleviating concerns of application latency or data privacy. By providing access to AWS via the Direct Connect service, we are empowering our customers to achieve improved performance of cloud-based applications,” said Eric Schwartz, president, EMEA, Equinix.

Cloud computing continues to grow at a steady pace across Europe. In fact, IDC predicts that the EMEA public cloud market will expand 26% over the next four years. Germany remains the second-largest cloud-consuming territory, and it has the highest growth rate (23.8% CAGR) among the major territories. According to IDC, basing on current trends, Germany could be the largest buyer of public cloud services by 2026*. Yet, one of the top CIO concerns in moving to the cloud continues to be compliance with German and European data protection laws. By expanding AWS Direct Connect within Germany, Equinix, and Amazon are enabling enterprise CIOs to advance their hybrid cloud strategies by seamlessly and safely incorporating public cloud services into their existing architectures.

Equinix’s Munich campus consists of two data centers comprised of 6,500 square meters (70,000 sq ft) of colocation space. Together, the Munich data centers are business hubs for more than 70 companies. Equinix Munich customers can choose from a broad range of network services from more than 30 network providers. They can also interconnect to customers and partners in their digital supply chain. By adding AWS Direct Connect to these facilities, Equinix is providing customers with an ideal location for them to host cloud services and help address any data privacy or data sovereignty issues.

Equinix Munich data centers have prime locations in one of Germany’s most important banking and insurance industry hubs. The region is also home to thriving automotive, Internet, digital media and electronics industries. Companies in these sectors rely on Equinix’s Munich colocation facilities and interconnection services to make highly reliable, low-latency connections with business partners and customers locally, nationally and internationally.

* Source: IDC, “Western Europe Public Cloud Services Forecast, 2016–2020” (Doc #EMEA41308316 / Jun 7, 2016)

Source: CloudStrategyMag