Cloud Computing News: AWS, Broadcom, Google Cloud, Akamai, More
Check out developments including exec changes, and new products and services targeting the channel.
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Panos Panay, head of the Surface and Windows units at Microsoft, is indeed on his way to Amazon.
On Sept. 27, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed the rumors that Panay will replace Dave Limp. Limp leads Amazon’s Devices & Services business. Panay will take over that role after Limp retires from Amazon.
But Limp isn’t retiring altogether. He’s on his way to Blue Origin, the space exploration company founded by Jeff Bezos — you know, that Jeff Bezos. Limp will take on the CEO role, replacing Bob Smith. Limp had said earlier this month that he didn’t know what the future held but that his next move would not be in consumer electronics.
Panay, meantime, will start at Amazon at the end of October. He’ll report to Jassy and join the Amazon S-Team.
“As a strong product builder and inventor who has deep experience in both hardware and integrated services, Panos will be a great addition to our D&S organization,” Jassy wrote in a Sept. 27 memo to employees.
Limp agreed.
“I’ve known Panos for years, and believe he will be a great addition,” he said in a note to staff. “He is a passionate product leader and I can’t wait to see what all of you invent together. I’ll work diligently with him for the next two months to ensure a smooth transition.”
Next up, more Amazon news from this week.
Industry observers are calling the move we’re about to discuss an attempt to catch up to rival Microsoft Azure. That could be but, either way, Amazon Web Services’ new, $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic is no small cheese.
In exchange for the money, AWS will serve as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider. Historically, Azure and Google Cloud, the world’s third-largest cloud computing vendor, have relied on such equity trades; AWS has eschewed that model — until now. That’s probably because, even though AWS has been touting its lead in AI, it has not kept pace with peers in consumer-centric generative AI. There’s Bedrock, of course, but it’s for developers and sits in the middle layer of the AI stack.
The Anthropic investment looks to shake that up by putting Anthropic’s technology closer to end users.
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” Jassy said in a prepared statement on Sept. 25.
Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021. Its foundation model is named Claude. In terms of capabilities, here’s what AWS had to say earlier this week:
“Customers report that Claude is much less likely to produce harmful outputs, easier to converse with, and more steerable compared to other foundation models, so developers can get their desired output with less effort. Anthropic’s … Claude 2 … scores above the 90th percentile on the GRE reading and writing exams, and similarly on quantitative reasoning.”
On the next slide, we shift gears and look at what Broadcom and Google Cloud are doing together.
There’s been so much Broadcom news around VMware that it might be easy to forget the chipmaker owns Symantec’s security products (not the services).
On that note, Symantec is joining forces with Google Cloud. It will embed Google Cloud’s generative AI into its platform to beef up cybersecurity.
The companies position the partnership as one that helps enterprises surmount the shortage of deeply knowledgeable IT security analysts. Less-experienced staff, they said in a joint press release, will gain access to features that summarize threat information in natural language and offer easy ways to operate security products without the need to learn difficult syntaxes.
“All security vendors will likely embed generative AI into their solutions if they haven’t done so already,” said Frank Dickson, group vice president of the security and trust unit at research firm IDC. “True innovators will have a deep understanding of how to tap into the predictive models behind generative AI to produce better security data and enable better outcomes. Companies with rich sets of data and expertise in AI/ML are certainly worth keeping an eye on.”
Symantec sells through the indirect channel. The company said the first phase of its Google Cloud-infused generative AI capability requires no updates from customers.
Thanks to its capabilities with Linode, Akamai Technologies continues to expand its cloud computing regions.
On Sept. 27, Akamai said it soon will add seven more data centers. They’ll be in Amsterdam; Jakarta; Los Angeles; Miami; Milan; Osaka; and São Paulo, Brazil, and come online throughout the next month.
This marks the third time Akamai has rolled out new regions since buying Linode last year. Akamai said putting São Paulo and Miami into the mix especially gives organizations an alternative in Latin America where the hyperscalers have dominated. Akamai plans to add more connectivity in São Paulo later this year. Targeting this region and Miami underscores Akamai’s intent to deliver cloud computing regions in hard-to-access markets, the company said.
To that point, the Milan data center will support customers in the Middle East, Akamai said.
Akamai has opened 13 new cloud computing regions over the past 90 days. The latest join a roster that includes various cities in North America, as well as some in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Akamai sells through channel partners.
Cloud governance vendor CoreStack has debuted a new product developed specifically for channel partners.
On Sept. 27, the company unveiled CoreStack Assessments, which works on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The platform equips managed service providers and system integrators with the ability to evaluate customers’ multicloud environments. That way, partners can identify and resolve issues around cloud computing security, compliance, cost and operations, CoreStack said.
“[O]ur partners will be able to capitalize more quickly on the opportunities that matter and help their customers realize the full potential of their cloud investments,” Saba Arumugam, CoreStack’s chief technology officer, said. “This solution provides our partners a robust, flexible and streamlined assessment experience so they can help customers embrace cloud best practices in the most efficient way possible.”
On the next slide, learn how channel partners should benefit from the new product.
MSPs and SIs can use the assessments and their results not only to deliver value-added services but to further create their own intellectual property, CoreStack said. They can do so as they build custom and reusable frameworks.
Plus, the reports that come of the assessments provide an opportunity for partners to go deeper with customers by focusing on FinOps, SecOps and CloudOps.
CoreStack offers interested partners a demonstration, then establishes pricing agreements. For assessments only, CoreStack has three bundles: entry, middle and scale. Entry includes up to 10 assessments per year for $10,000. Middle allows 11-50 assessments for $25,000. And scale supports unlimited assessments for $50,000. If partners want to add governance around financial, security and cloud operations, the cost of the bundles goes up by half a percentage point.
From there, partners get training on the implementation process and any needed additional support. On top of that, CoreStack helps partners learn how to secure credits from cloud providers for performing client assessments, Suren Singh, chief sales and partnerships officer at CoreStack, told Channel Futures.
As for the timing of the release of CoreStack Assessments, it couldn’t be more prescient as channel partners build their cloud businesses.
“Assessments are necessary and valuable, but thanks to complex multicloud environments running a wide range of workloads across multiple customers and teams — and the fact that best practices for cloud environments are continuously evolving — assessments are also time-consuming and complex,” Singh said. “This complexity grows exponentially as the volume of customers, assessments, workloads, services, teams and cloud providers increases, and it can result in negative impact to partner margins.”
Given those scenarios, MSPs and SIs can have a hard time tracking individual customer assessments and their results. Also, “it gets harder to ensure consistency and high quality across assessments, which can lead to missed issues and inaccurate assessments,” Singh said. “Partners can find themselves overwhelmed, leading to reduced service quality, missed opportunities and strained customer relationships. Cloud-native assessments, while readily available, are too manual, are all a little different, and can’t address the complexity of multicloud or the scalability of enterprise environments.”
CoreStack aims to resolve those challenges with the new tool.
Finally, we look at the changes happening within Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The company, which continues its transition from hardware to a cloud computing focus, recently underwent a reorganization that saw some top executives depart. The changes come as HPE digs in to hybrid cloud.
“We are creating a new hybrid cloud business unit, to be led by HPE chief technology officer Fidelma Russo,” HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri wrote in a recent blog. “This business will bring together the HPE GreenLake platform with the technologies and services of HPE Storage, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions and the current Office of the CTO organization. This new group will accelerate our hybrid cloud strategy as we deliver one portfolio of storage, software, data and cloud services on the HPE GreenLake platform.”
Russo over the past two years led the team that created HPE GreenLake.
“Fidelma is a customer-centric leader and will continue to bring revolutionary new offerings to bear for our global customers, helping HPE realize our distinct advantage as we pursue opportunities in the hybrid cloud market,” Neri said.
Due to the shifts, Tom Black will take over the private cloud team, reporting to Russo. Vishal Lall, general manager of HPE GreenLake and the cloud solutions group, is leaving. And Pradeep Kumar, senior vice president and general manager of HPE services, is retiring. Mark Bakkar will take over Kumar’s responsibilities.
Neri said the reorganization will take effect Nov. 1.
Finally, we look at the changes happening within Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The company, which continues its transition from hardware to a cloud computing focus, recently underwent a reorganization that saw some top executives depart. The changes come as HPE digs in to hybrid cloud.
“We are creating a new hybrid cloud business unit, to be led by HPE chief technology officer Fidelma Russo,” HPE president and CEO Antonio Neri wrote in a recent blog. “This business will bring together the HPE GreenLake platform with the technologies and services of HPE Storage, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Solutions and the current Office of the CTO organization. This new group will accelerate our hybrid cloud strategy as we deliver one portfolio of storage, software, data and cloud services on the HPE GreenLake platform.”
Russo over the past two years led the team that created HPE GreenLake.
“Fidelma is a customer-centric leader and will continue to bring revolutionary new offerings to bear for our global customers, helping HPE realize our distinct advantage as we pursue opportunities in the hybrid cloud market,” Neri said.
Due to the shifts, Tom Black will take over the private cloud team, reporting to Russo. Vishal Lall, general manager of HPE GreenLake and the cloud solutions group, is leaving. And Pradeep Kumar, senior vice president and general manager of HPE services, is retiring. Mark Bakkar will take over Kumar’s responsibilities.
Neri said the reorganization will take effect Nov. 1.
If you’ve been looking for the latest cloud computing-related news in one place from Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Broadcom, Google Cloud, Akamai, CoreStack and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we’ve got your back.
This week (and, ok, a straggler from last week), each of the companies has made a big splash, with quite a few implications and new capabilities for the indirect sales channel.
Over at Amazon, we look at the executive musical chairs taking place. The company has at last announced its replacement for Dave Limp and, well, the name won’t come as a huge surprise. But we do have the 411 on the change. It’s not entirely cloud computing-centric but there is an AI play that contains a tie.
Then we talk about what Amazon’s biggest money-maker, AWS is doing in generative AI. Many outlets are calling the development an attempt to catch up to its cloud computing rivals.
After that, we look at why Broadcom and Google Cloud are teaming up. If you sell Symantec products, you’ll be interested.
Akamai, in the meantime, continues to build its global presence with the help of its 2022 Linode acquisition. Find out where the cloud computing provider has installed its newest data centers — and in which hard-to-reach regions.
Then, find out what CoreStack, a cloud governance vendor, just released for managed service providers and system integrators. If your cloud computing specialty includes FinOps, SecOps and/or CloudOps, you’ll want to learn more.
Finally, we wrap up with a look at what HPE just did to hone its cloud computing focus.
See the slideshow above for a full week’s worth of cloud computing news.
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