From JEDI and Pax8 to AWS and Salesforce: Hot Cloud Computing News
It’s summer, which tends to mean a slowdown in announcements. But cloud computing is pretty active this week.
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Earlier this week, the Department of Defense’s second-highest official appeared to suggest the Pentagon will decide JEDI’s fate within the next month. That’s according to reporting from NextGov. The publication cited Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks as saying, “[W]e’re working through what the potential solutions are.” Hicks was speaking at a tech summit hosted by Defense One.
JEDI remains in limbo amid ongoing legal fights between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. AWS expected to win the potentially $10 billion project, but the Pentagon instead awarded it to Microsoft. AWS blamed then-President Trump and his feelings toward outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Judges have sided with AWS, blocking Microsoft’s ability to start work on JEDI. The effort to upgrade the military’s systems to modern cloud computing has since stalled.
The Pentagon may look into reopening bids on something that looks like JEDI, and that could support more than one vendor. Part of the contention throughout the JEDI process has been that the deal would only go to one provider. Companies including Oracle and IBM early on went to court to contest that structure, but they didn’t get far.
Still, what will come next is up in the air. The Pentagon not long ago said it would make a move relating to JEDI soon, but it has yet to do so. It might even axe JEDI altogether.
Cloud marketplace vendor Pax8 this week expanded its partnership with Nerdio, which develops Azure platforms for managed service providers. The deal takes the companies’ work together to a global level. That means MSPs throughout the world now may use the Nerdio Manager for MSP platform. The managed application lets MSPs build Azure Virtual Desktop practices.
The timing couldn’t be more auspicious.
“As companies begin transitioning back into their offices, many will maintain some aspect of remote work, enabled through Microsoft’s AVD solution,” said Ryan Walsh, chief product officer and channel head at Pax8. “This will expand the scope and opportunities for partners worldwide.”
Pricing should appeal, too. Pax8 says MSPs can save up to 75% on Azure compute and storage costs with Nerdio’s capabilities. Nerdio Manager for MSP features include per-user Azure cost reporting, performance and usage monitoring, and image creation and management.
NetApp continues to find its cloud computing footing and further enable its channel partners.
The storage and data management giant this week snapped up Paris-based Data Mechanics. It did not disclose financial terms. Gartner predicts a $397.4 billion cloud computing market by next year; thus, NetApp’s strategy makes sense. Enterprise reliance on the cloud translates into unprecedented levels of data growth. Organizations need to incorporate analytics so they can identify areas to cut costs, improve operational efficiency and automate manual processes. The Data Mechanics transaction will facilitate all of that, according to NetApp.
“Now more than ever, our customers are adopting cloud-first and cloud native strategies that will enable them to be more agile and adaptable in the face of unprecedented data growth,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Public Cloud Services business unit. “Adding Data Mechanics … will make it simpler and more cost-effective for organizations across all industries to fully leverage Apache Spark and Kubernetes to advance their data and cloud initiatives.”
NetApp purchased Data Mechanics less than a year after buying Spot. Spot is a cloud operations provider that automates and optimizes workloads in public cloud environments.
Rackspace Technology this week unveiled Cloud Native Development (CND) Professional Services.
The offering covers all the bases, from fleshing out ideas to turning them into cloud deployments. The scope even includes re-engineering legacy applications so they work in the cloud.
“Our engineering expertise in cloud-native technologies, cloud platforms, modern architectures, tools, and programming languages, enables us to efficiently deliver the best outcomes for customers,” said Amir Kashani, vice president of cloud native development and IoT solutions at Rackspace.
Rackspace sells through the indirect channel.
Amazon Web Services has launched its CloudFormation Public Registry.
The portal lets users find, provision and manage third-party extensions, including resource types and modules from AWS partners and developers.
AWS said this week that launch partners already have published more than 35 extensions. Those companies include MongoDB, Datadog, Atlassian Opsgenie, JFrog, Trend Micro, Splunk, Aqua Security, FireEye, Sysdig, Snyk, Check Point, Spot by NetApp, Gremlin, Stackery and Iridium.
Anyone now may publish their resource types on the Public Registry, as well as publish reusable modules there.
AWS does not impose additional charges for using AWS CloudFormation with native AWS resource types. However, using AWS CloudFormation with third-party resource types will incur fees based on the number of handler operations run per month and handler operation duration.
The CloudFormation Public Registry is generally available in the following AWS Regions: U.S. East, U.S. West, Canada, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa.
Speaking of AWS, the public cloud services provider has ramped up its partnership with Salesforce.
On June 23, the two companies announced new capabilities for developers. First, those partners now can build and launch custom applications that connect Salesforce data and workflows into solutions running on AWS. Salesforce developers also can integrate AWS data and workflows into their Salesforce applications.
Furthermore, Salesforce is embedding AWS services for voice, video, artificial intelligence and machine learning directly in new applications. This allows customers to buy out-of-the-box solutions directly from Salesforce and then consume the integrated AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis.
“For more than five years, our customers have benefitted from a tight relationship between AWS and Salesforce,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO. “Now, we are taking the partnership to the next level by integrating our offerings so developers using both AWS and Salesforce can build unified applications much faster and simpler than ever before. …[W]e are significantly simplifying developers’ lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale.”
Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, agreed.
“This is a milestone partnership for the technology industry, and one that will enable our customers to experience an even more powerful Salesforce Customer 360 and achieve a new level of success in their business,” Benioff said. “With a more strongly unified Salesforce and AWS platform, our customers around the world can create a single source of truth across sales, service, marketing and commerce, and achieve success from anywhere.”
Here’s another Gartner stat to set the stage: By 2024, people who are not technology pros will build 80% of technology products and services.
With that in mind, Salesforce looks to be on the right track. The CRM vendor on June 23 introduced the latest version of its Salesforce Platform, which now features low-code development tools.
Gartner says businesses and organizations face an urgent need to go digital faster. At the same time, they can’t keep overwhelming their IT departments. To that point, almost 90% (88%) of IT leaders recently told the research firm their workloads have increased in the last 12 months. Ninety-six percent of those respondents added that they cannot meet the current demand for apps on their own. Therefore, many plan to turn to low-code software.
“Digital business is treated as a team sport by CEOs and no longer the sole domain of the IT department,” said Rajesh Kandaswamy, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “Growth in digital data, low-code development tools and artificial intelligence-assisted development are among the many factors that enable the democratization of technology development beyond IT professionals.”
Along those lines, the new Salesforce Platform comes with low-code tools for interactive app development and automation. It also contains new elastic computing, AI-driven data protection, identity management and DevOps capabilities. This gives anyone — including business users, admins, designers and developers — the ability to build apps and processes, all while ensuring IT governance, scale and trust, Salesforce says.
“The future of app development is low-code, where anyone can participate to solve any business problem,” said Patrick Stokes, executive vice president and general manager of platform at Salesforce.
Here’s another Gartner stat to set the stage: By 2024, people who are not technology pros will build 80% of technology products and services.
With that in mind, Salesforce looks to be on the right track. The CRM vendor on June 23 introduced the latest version of its Salesforce Platform, which now features low-code development tools.
Gartner says businesses and organizations face an urgent need to go digital faster. At the same time, they can’t keep overwhelming their IT departments. To that point, almost 90% (88%) of IT leaders recently told the research firm their workloads have increased in the last 12 months. Ninety-six percent of those respondents added that they cannot meet the current demand for apps on their own. Therefore, many plan to turn to low-code software.
“Digital business is treated as a team sport by CEOs and no longer the sole domain of the IT department,” said Rajesh Kandaswamy, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “Growth in digital data, low-code development tools and artificial intelligence-assisted development are among the many factors that enable the democratization of technology development beyond IT professionals.”
Along those lines, the new Salesforce Platform comes with low-code tools for interactive app development and automation. It also contains new elastic computing, AI-driven data protection, identity management and DevOps capabilities. This gives anyone — including business users, admins, designers and developers — the ability to build apps and processes, all while ensuring IT governance, scale and trust, Salesforce says.
“The future of app development is low-code, where anyone can participate to solve any business problem,” said Patrick Stokes, executive vice president and general manager of platform at Salesforce.
The cloud computing sector has seen a lot of movement this week, despite a lack of big news (you can chalk that up to summertime lulls). Let’s catch you up.
First off, some interesting tidbits related to the Defense Department’s infamous JEDI contract arose this week. You’ll find out more on the first slide. Next, and more partner-related, Pax8 and Nerdio made an announcement for managed service providers. After that, NetApp and Rackspace both showed up this week with some news that impacts the channel. Finally, we’ve got the latest from Amazon Web Services and Salesforce as well. There’s a lot to digest and it’s all here in this slideshow roundup of the week’s most significant cloud computing announcements.
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