Microsoft Azure as Big as AWS? What New Numbers Have to Say
Plus, get the skinny on news from Google Cloud’s Data Summit, on international cloud momentum and more.
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Microsoft Azure has at last caught up to Amazon Web Services – according to one research firm’s new numbers, anyway.
IDC has issued updated statistics on global public cloud services and slipped this nugget into its press release: “Microsoft now shares the top position with Amazon Web Services in the whole public cloud services market with both companies holding 12.8% revenue share for the year.”
Should those numbers hold, that would give Microsoft and its Azure division big reason to celebrate. For years, Redmond has trailed AWS, long considered the world’s largest – and hard to beat – public cloud provider. (That’s despite the much-contested JEDI contract going to Microsoft.) Google Cloud Platform has remained in third place.
But that’s not all. In the next slide, you’ll find out just how much cloud adoption continues to soar.
If you’re wondering about all the cloud hype, check out IDC’s numbers from its new Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.
Public cloud services adoption reached new heights in 2020 as COVID-19 spread – revenue reached $312 billion, up 24.1%, IDC said. SaaS accounted for much of that, taking in $148 billion.
“Organizations across industries hastened the replacement of legacy business applications with a new breed of SaaS applications that is data-driven, intuitive, composable, and ideally suited for more distributed cloud architectures,” said Frank Della Rosa, research director in IDC’s SaaS and Cloud Software group. “The SaaS apps market is dominated by a longtail of providers that account for 65% of the total market.”
Overall public cloud spending spread out across five providers: AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle, IDC said. They all captured 38% of the worldwide total, growing 32% year-over-year, analysts said.
Google Cloud aims to break businesses out of their silo habits. The vendor on Wednesday debuted three new database and data analytics platforms – Dataplex, Datastream and Analytics Hub – at its first-ever Data Cloud Summit. Each component predicts outcomes. That means leaders can act on data in ways they never have before and stop missing out on opportunities.
Keeping information in separate places – Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Teams, Asana and so on – hurts organizations in significant ways. First, there’s the obvious: When people can’t view all relevant data in one location, they can’t analyze what they don’t know. A lack of visibility blocks informed decision-making. Second, siloing data comes at a price. Gartner recently estimated that poor data quality costs organizations, on average, $12.8 million each year.
On the next slide, find out what each new Google Cloud data platform does.
Dataplex lets organizations manage, monitor and govern data. The portal works across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, Google Cloud said. It comes with security and governance controls, as well as analytics.
Next, Datastream is a serverless change data capture and replication service. This lets organizations synchronize information across databases, storage systems and applications, Google Cloud said. The product features minimal latency and supports real-time analytics.
Finally, Analytics Hub exchanges data analytics assets. Users may curate libraries and share information across organizations. It’s a fully managed service so organizations don’t have to build and administer their own infrastructure.
Dataplex and Datastream are available in preview. The preview for Analytics Hub will come in the third quarter.
Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud will help Israel’s government get into the cloud. Both cloud vendors have landed a part in the more-than-$1 billion project, Reuters reported this week.
Israel has named the effort “Nimbus.” It will roll out in four phases and target Israel’s public sector and military agencies. Reuters said Nimbus will not serve as a centralized system because two providers, with their separate technologies and capabilities, are involved.
While there’s no apparent channel play yet, there could be at some point.
On a similar note, Italy is eyeing a cloud storage system for its sensitive state data. The platform could be built by any or all of the big U.S. names: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Reuters reports the tech giants could be involved despite calls by some EU politicians for solutions developed in Europe.
“We have decided to create a national cloud hub for state data, whose residency will be in Italy and in Europe, but we will use the best technologies available at international level,” Vittorio Colao, Italy’s minister of innovation and digital transition, said during a recent online event, per Reuters.
Reliance on U.S.-based cloud computing technologies continues to generate controversy in other countries. Many leaders fear surveillance after the feds passed the CLOUD Act of 2018.
Calao, however, appears to have few hesitations.
“France has recently outlined its policy on national cloud … and we want to do exactly the same,” Reuters reported Colao as saying.
Speaking of international cloud momentum, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is helping with Gaia-X. That’s the Europe-led cloud computing effort that will support more than 300 organizations.
HPE designed a framework for Gaia-X that supports almost all the capabilities required in a “decentralized, federated environment,” the company said. Much like the Google Cloud announcement in this news roundup, HPE will help organizations to make the most of their data.
“Gaia-X is an answer to the key question of the next wave of digital transformation: How can we create network effects without centralizing all the data? This is perfectly in line with our company strategy which is focused on unlocking the value of data distributed across locations and clouds,” said Johannes Koch, senior vice president, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, at HPE. “However, Gaia-X does not do the job alone. It requires a range of capabilities to benefit from this platform. In essence, you must know how to monetize data and put it to work. That’s exactly what we help customers achieve with our Gaia-X solutions.”
The HPE framework uses key products from the vendor’s software and its marketplace. Everything is available as a service through the GreenLake portfolio.
HPE also has released a road map service for Gaia-X so customers can figure out how to access and benefit from Gaia-X.
Juniper Networks has released a new version of its Apstra software for building “cloud-level” data centers with open networking.
On the channel front, that means VARs may “lead with operations while preserving underlying vendor preference where they must.”
That’s the word from Mike Bushong, vice president of data center at Juniper Networks. The latest Apstra edition accomplishes “two things that really matter for our channel,” he told Channel Futures.
“First and foremost, this release is a reaffirmation of our multivendor strategy,” Bushong said. “With Apstra 4.0, we continue support for Cisco, Arista, Cumulus (now Nvidia), SONiC, and, of course, Juniper. This allows channel partners to develop operations practices — software and services — that can be leveraged over the top of whatever vendor underlay happens to be in place. Second, this release of Apstra helps bring tunable control to our customers, extending the reach of Apstra into data center operators that have more contextualized needs.”
Channel partners, take note. If your customers worry about the cost of cloud downtime, you may be able to help.
Startup Parametrix Insurance just nailed down $17.5 million in funding so it can offer policies to organizations using third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems.
The company is not actually an insurance carrier. Rather, it teams with the incumbents for payouts. Its differentiator lies in its approach. Parametrix created a system that monitors IT services worldwide, spotting service interruptions. It then provides data points galore so customers (we recommend, with your help) can estimate financial risk tied to downtime. Then they create a customized rate of payout per hour they’re not operating.
“The business world’s dependence on cloud solutions is rapidly accelerating,” said Yonatan Hatzor, CEO at Parametrix Insurance. “To help them hedge this external risk, we created a new category in the insurance market by introducing reliable protection from the cloud downtime incidents that inevitably occur.”
Channel partners, take note. If your customers worry about the cost of cloud downtime, you may be able to help.
Startup Parametrix Insurance just nailed down $17.5 million in funding so it can offer policies to organizations using third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems.
The company is not actually an insurance carrier. Rather, it teams with the incumbents for payouts. Its differentiator lies in its approach. Parametrix created a system that monitors IT services worldwide, spotting service interruptions. It then provides data points galore so customers (we recommend, with your help) can estimate financial risk tied to downtime. Then they create a customized rate of payout per hour they’re not operating.
“The business world’s dependence on cloud solutions is rapidly accelerating,” said Yonatan Hatzor, CEO at Parametrix Insurance. “To help them hedge this external risk, we created a new category in the insurance market by introducing reliable protection from the cloud downtime incidents that inevitably occur.”
Do you buy it? Microsoft Azure now is as big as Amazon Web Services, according to one research firm.
If true (meaning, if multiple analysts start to say the same thing), that would mark a huge coup for Azure. The cloud platform has worked hard to catch up to AWS, which observers have repeatedly ranked as the world’s largest public cloud services vendor. Only the coming months will tell whether Microsoft Azure retains – or surpasses – market share on par with its biggest competitor. Check out the first part of the slideshow above for a deeper look into this news.
Stick around, though. This cloud news roundup is chock-full of items you might have missed this week.
As a couple hints: Google Cloud is out to really unify organizations’ data (the holy grail of cloud, is it not?). And there’s a lot happening on the international front for Google, AWS and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Finally, get the scoop on Juniper Networks’ latest move for partners, and find out what Parametrix’s $17.5 million in funding means for your customers.
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