Cloud Computing News: Broadcom-VMware, Google-Anthropic, Red Hat, More
A new week is kicking off with a slew of cloud updates.
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The clock has stopped — for now — on the European Union’s antitrust investigation into the $61 billion Broadcom acquisition of VMware.
Reuters reports that the European Commission, the antitrust arm of the EU, has put its scrutiny on pause while waiting for Broadcom to supply requested data. The clock stopped on Jan. 31, effective Jan. 24, according to Reuters.
“This procedure in merger investigations is activated if the parties fail to provide, in a timely fashion, an important piece of information that the Commission has requested from them,” a Commission spokesperson told Reuters. “Once the missing information is supplied by the parties, the clock is restarted and the deadline for the Commission’s decision is then adjusted accordingly.”
It’s not clear what the “missing information” constitutes.
Broadcom aims to add enterprise software and cloud capabilities to its business model with the anticipated purchase of VMware. Its path to deal closure has been hampered, though, by greater global regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech transactions. The EU launched its in-depth investigation into Broadcom-VMware in December. The Commission is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components that interoperate with VMware’s software.
Alphabet’s Google is making good on its intent to ramp up more quickly in artificial intelligence.
During an earnings call last week, Alphabet execs said to look for more AI focus from Google. They said that without explicitly referring to competitor Microsoft, which continues to invest billions of dollars in OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the industry consensus is that Google has fallen a bit woefully behind in the AI arms race.
Now the company is trying to make up for that by investing almost $400 million into AI startup Anthropic. (Consider, though, that Microsoft has funneled more than $10 billion into Chat GPT.)
“AI has evolved from academic research to become one of the biggest drivers of technological change, creating new opportunities for growth and improved services across all industries,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, in a Feb. 3 press release. “Google Cloud is providing open infrastructure for the next generation of AI startups, and our partnership with Anthropic is a great example of how we’re helping users and businesses tap into the power of reliable and responsible AI.”
Neither Google nor Anthropic would comment to Bloomberg on the investment, but they did separately say Anthropic will use Google’s cloud computing services, per Bloomberg. Google gets a stake in Anthropic but Anthropic is not required to use that money on Google’s cloud services, the outlet said.
Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by former OpenAI leaders. Its chatbot, Claude, takes aim at OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude is not yet publicly available. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on Feb. 2 that Google intends to release AI chatbots soon; consumers will use them “as a companion to search,” he told analysts during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.
Speaking of Google Cloud, Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform is now available on the cloud computing provider’s marketplace.
Organizations managing multiple clouds need simple ways to deploy and scale automation, especially to free up IT teams to focus on high-value projects, Red Hat said. As such, the Ansible Automation Platform delivers pre-integrated services, including Google Virtual Private Cloud, security groups, load balancers, Google Compute and instance groups. There’s also integrated billing. Red Hat said customers may count Ansible Automation Platform toward any existing enterprise committed spend agreements with Google.
Red Hat also has released OpenShift 4.12. New features support scaling workloads across hybrid clouds without compromising security, Red Hat said. To make good on that claim, Red Hat said that OpenShift 4.12, based on Kubernetes 1.25, introduces three new Operators and an update to the Compliance Operator.
The new Operators are made up of the Security Profiles Operator, the Ingress Node Firewall Operator and the Network Observability Operator. Changes to the Compliance Operator include compliance scans and remedies for detected problems.
Demand for data center capacity continues to grow, even as organizations become more attentive to their cloud computing spending. New data from Synergy Research Group shows that 2022 churned out a significant number of M&A deals that fell just shy of the record number set in 2021.
Last year saw 187 data center M&A deals close for an aggregate value of $48 billion. The year before, the figures reached $49 billion. All told, data center M&A has totaled more than $200 billion over the past seven years, with most of that activity falling within the last two years, Synergy analysts said.
Private equity investors are driving the charge. They see data centers as safe long-term investments, according to Synergy. That makes sense. Cloud computing will not disappear. Even though global spending has slowed somewhat, organizations will continue to rely on cloud services and infrastructure for decades to come.
The highlights for 2022 were the $15 billion acquisition of CyrusOne by investment firms KKR and Global Investment Partners, and the acquisition of Switch by DigitalBridge for $11 billion, Synergy said.
On the next slide, see what Synergy has to say about the latest round of cloud provider earnings and what that means about the market overall.
Spending on cloud infrastructure services exceeded $61 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.
That marked 21% growth over the year-ago quarter, according to brand-new numbers from Synergy Research Group.
But all was not roses and sunshine. Globally, the strong U.S. dollar and a “severely restricted” Chinese market both hampered any increases in cloud computing adoption, Synergy said. Within the United States itself, though, the story was different. The fourth-quarter growth rate actually hit 27%, analysts said. Still, that was lower than the average growth rate of 31% in the previous four quarter.
In terms of which vendor ranks where, Amazon Web Services remains top dog, according to Synergy. Microsoft Azure is second, and Google continues to hover in third place. AWS claims 32-34% market share, analysts estimate, while Azure holds 23% (“a strong uptick,” analysts said) and Google has 11% (“in line with the previous quarter but a percentage point up from a year ago.). Combined, the three hyperscalers account for 66% of the worldwide market, up from 63% a year ago, Synergy said.
Cloud storage costs are rising, taking up more than one-quarter of many organizations’ total cloud costs.
That’s according to a new report, “The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage in 2023,” from Virtana, which provides hybrid cloud infrastructure management.
Almost three-quarters (69%) of survey respondents told Virtana that cloud storage expenses are eating up a fourth of their budgets. Another 23% said more than half their cloud budgets are going toward storage. Even so, as many as 84% of respondents want most of their storage to stay in the cloud, while 55% want to keep cloud storage, but not at the expense of cost and efficiency.
“Storage doesn’t usually make headline news, but it is an essential element of all enterprise applications,” said Jon Cyr, vice president of product at Virtana. “Yet many in the hybrid space are not thinking about or preparing for growth, change and rising costs related to storage.”
Virtana polled 350 IT leaders, all cloud decision-makers, in the U.S. and the U.K. to reach its findings.
Cloud storage costs are rising, taking up more than one-quarter of many organizations’ total cloud costs.
That’s according to a new report, “The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage in 2023,” from Virtana, which provides hybrid cloud infrastructure management.
Almost three-quarters (69%) of survey respondents told Virtana that cloud storage expenses are eating up a fourth of their budgets. Another 23% said more than half their cloud budgets are going toward storage. Even so, as many as 84% of respondents want most of their storage to stay in the cloud, while 55% want to keep cloud storage, but not at the expense of cost and efficiency.
“Storage doesn’t usually make headline news, but it is an essential element of all enterprise applications,” said Jon Cyr, vice president of product at Virtana. “Yet many in the hybrid space are not thinking about or preparing for growth, change and rising costs related to storage.”
Virtana polled 350 IT leaders, all cloud decision-makers, in the U.S. and the U.K. to reach its findings.
Another Monday has arrived and with it, important tidbits of cloud computing news. We’ve got a short slideshow on tap for you to get you up to speed.
Here are a few previews:
If you’ve been tracking Broadcom’s intended, $61 billion purchase of VMware, we have an update. The antitrust arm of the European Union has made a significant decision amid its investigation.
If you’ve been wondering about Google’s place in the recently revved up AI arms race, wonder no more. The company intends to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in artificial intelligence (although its investment isn’t quite as large as its rival’s).
Also, Google Cloud and Red Hat have some mutual-ish news. If you’re on the developer side and keen on automation, you’ll want to check out the recent announcement.
Recall 2021’s record data center M&A numbers? New stats show that 2022 was not far behind, indicating investor faith in the cloud sector. That comes from Synergy Research Group.
In additional cloud computing news, find out where Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud all rank now that their fourth-quarter earnings have been released.
And, finally, we take a look at cloud storage and how much it’s costing organizations, courtesy of a new Virtana.
See the slideshow above for a quick look at this early-in-the-week roundup of cloud computing news.
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