AWS Still Dominates, IBM Turns Heads With Cloud-Centric Announcement

The week is ending with a bit of a bang in terms of cloud news. Find out what’s happening with two of the biggest brands in the tech industry – Amazon Web Services and IBM – and get a look at two new cloud security products from a channel-friendly provider.

AWS Contributes ‘Impressive’ Amount to Amazon Bottom Line

Amazon Web Services revenue climbed 34% compared to a year ago, and Wall Street is loving the news.

In fact, Amazon as a whole joined Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft in the trillion-dollar market cap club in after-hours trading on Thursday.

AWS contributed a fair share of that excitement for Amazon with its $9.95 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2019. That represented nearly two-thirds of Amazon’s operating income, “an impressive contributor to the bottom line,” Futurum Research’s Daniel Newman, principal analyst, wrote in a Jan. 30 blog.

Granted, the numbers were down 1% from the third quarter of last year but that hasn’t dampened investor enthusiasm. Besides, a slight slowdown from triple digits to high double digits is to be expected.

“For all of the cloud providers, the growth percentage will start to go down as the overall number goes up,” Newman said. “This is a law-of-large-numbers thing — just ask Facebook.”

Several key initiatives fueled the AWS momentum, Newman added, including the general availability of the long-awaited Outposts portfolio.

“The key here is to pay attention to the vast innovation and expansion of capabilities,” Newman wrote. “With a focus on IaaS and PaaS, AWS continues its approach in meeting the customer where they are, and we are seeing this with the attention to areas like AI, hybrid cloud and high-availability database services.”

But AWS has strong competition hot on its heels. Microsoft Azure this week posted 62% growth for the fourth quarter and will keep giving AWS a run for its money — just note the largely unexpected award of the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Redmond.

There is room in the market for both providers, Newman said.

“I see the two companies continuing to separate from the pack and both will benefit from the growth of cloud and the competition,” he wrote.

Big Blue Bets on Cloud With Leadership Change

IBM is betting on cloud with the appointment of a new CEO.

Big Blue announced on Thursday that Ginni Rometty, who led the company for eight years, will step down in April, succeeded by Arvind Krishna.

Krishna heads the cloud and cognitive software division as senior vice president and was instrumental in the Red Hat acquisition. Those two factors are key to IBM’s strategy as it seeks to grow in the cloud era, Futurum Research’s Newman said.

“I believe the company needs to really zero in on the cloud business through the lens of multicloud going forward,” he wrote in a Jan. 30 blog. “The Red Hat acquisition tees the company up nicely on the developer side and while the IBM Cloud has fallen far behind the leaders AWS and Azure. With Red Hat, IBM Cloud and the support of GTS, the company is in a sound position to scale up the multicloud efforts, which could be a key part of reviving the public cloud business.”

Read Channel Futures’ in-depth coverage of the IBM leadership change here.

England’s nCipher Debuts 2 New nShield Option Packs for Cloud Security

U.K.-based nCipher Security this week added two new packs to its nShield hardware module portfolio to support enterprises’ cloud-first initiatives.

nCipher, which sells through the channel, released the …

… Web Services Option Pack and the Container Option Pack. Both products help cut development times and budgets while ensuring security.

Web Services Option Pack simplifies cloud-first data center deployments, nCipher said. It provides a REST API between applications that require cryptographic key and data protection services. It also includes nShield hardware security modules.

The Container Option Pack helps those modules to operate in a containerized environment. More enterprises are using containers because they scale easily and are simple to manage. The hardware security module in this scenario comes with a template, reducing the time needed to develop and launch the applications built on the containers.

“One of the biggest drivers of digital transformation is the widespread enterprise adoption of cloud,” said Peter Galvin, chief strategy officer at nCipher Security. “IDC predicts that 70% of new enterprise applications will be developed cloud-native by 2021. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-first strategies and operate in multicloud environments, security concerns remain — from visibility into the data-protection architecture to managing complex security policies and encryption keys that secure applications and data.”

nCipher’s new products are available in several packages, including on a subscription basis.