Microsoft Layoffs, Broadcom-VMware, Google Cloud, AWS: Cloud News Galore

A new fiscal year at Microsoft means more layoffs, with the exact number known only by Redmond itself.

Already in 2024, Microsoft has shed at least 3,000 workers. The latest round reportedly took place just before July 1, the beginning of the company’s 2025 fiscal year. Corporations commonly enact layoffs at such times.

Various reports and LinkedIn posts indicate the newest cuts took place in areas including project and product management. 

Microsoft’s widely distributed statement to media reads as follows: “Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business. We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners.” 

In June, Microsoft also axed people from its Azure cloud and HoloLens groups. The move came after the company in early 2024 dumped 2,000 staff from its gaming unit after wrapping up the Activision Blizzard acquisition.

The ongoing layoffs continue as Microsoft aims to keep its profit margins favorable, even as it shovels a ton of money into the cloud infrastructure powering its AI applications and services.

Broadcom this week borrowed $5 billion to refinance some of the loans it obtained to pay for the $61 billion VMware purchase last year.

The chipmaker used the U.S. investment-grade bond market for the transaction. According to Bloomberg, Broadcom sold debt in three parts. And a Broadcom filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows the notes coming due in 2027, 2029 and 2031, respectively. Bank of America, BNP Paribas SA and HSBC Holdings Plc led the bond sale, Bloomberg reported.

In 2022, Broadcom secured $32 billion in bridge loans to help pay for the VMware acquisition. It had to refinance some of the package last year as it encountered unexpected regulatory delays.

Civo, one of the independent cloud providers that has been most vocal about the repercussions of the Broadcom-VMware combination, just came out with its own research around outcomes from the $61 billion deal.

As a teaser, a handful of respondents told the U.K.-based company that they’re paying more than 10 times more for VMware software than they were before.

Ever since Broadcom closed the VMware purchase, and subsequently revamped portfolio structures and channel programs, rival vendors have been releasing self-promoting reports focused on impacts to VMware customers and partners. These studies are intended to lure unhappy VMware customers to competitors’ platforms.

Civo, in the latest volley lobbed at VMware by Broadcom, concludes that most customers are feeling “significant … dissatisfaction” as a result of the Broadcom-VMware transaction. 

“Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has not been beneficial for customers, drastically hindering the cloud services they had grown accustomed to while leaving many of them in the lurch over prices and services,” said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo.

Civo's Mark Boost

Indeed, the company said, almost 70% of VMware users are expecting price increases (which Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised months ago would not happen). 

Among those facing higher costs, 48% told Civo those expenses have doubled. Meanwhile, another 30% have seen a four-fold jump and 15% are confronting a ten-fold surge in prices, according to Civo. 

In other findings, Civo said it discovered that VMware customers have new operational challenges in front of them that weren’t an issue before the Broadcom purchase. For example, 45% of respondents told the provider that their organization no longer operates with the same agility. It was not clear in what ways that might be occurring. Civo further pinpointed a 12% rise in VMware customers looking to switch vendors.

Civo said it surveyed 1,080 current and former VMware users. The company did not state whether it conducted its research through an independent third-party.

Google Cloud has made its generative AI specialization, announced at its event in April, available to all partners.

“Generative AI represents perhaps the largest opportunity that partners have ever seen, but addressing the opportunity will require deep product expertise and an understanding of how to help customers go from idea to business impact,” Colleen Kapase, vice president of Google Cloud’s channel and partner programs, told Channel Futures.

Google Cloud's Colleen Kapase

At Google Cloud, earning a “partner specialization” represents the highest technical designation achievable in Partner Advantage, the company’s partner program. Partners who pass the curriculum prove that they have both the proficiency and outcomes end users need around generative AI using Vertex AI. Google Cloud built Vertex AI as a unified platform housing AI models; users may play with models via that portal and also create, deploy and manage AI agents, which can perform complex tasks, make decisions and more, per a new report from research firm Forrester (which dubs “agentic AI” as “perhaps the most exciting development” in AI in 2024.)

“We’re encouraging all of our partners to continue building deep technical proficiency with AI, including by earning the Generative AI — Services Specialization, building their certified experts, attending trainings and much more,” Kapase added.

The certification was in the early preview stages during Google Cloud Next, offered only to a few partners in the intervening months.

Amazon Web Services says it has surpassed its goal of delivering cloud training to 29 million people.

On Wednesday, the world’s largest cloud computing provider said 31 million people, and counting, have taken its courses in 200 countries and territories. AWS announced in December 2020 that it would invest hundreds of millions of dollars to offer its free cloud training. Its goal was to reach 29 million people worldwide by 2025. 

Maureen Lonergan, vice president of AWS training and certification, called the milestone “incredible” and said AWS will continue offering its training so people can “prepare for in-demand jobs.”

AWS met its goal early by expanding its options for learning, including providing a number of its courses for free and in multiple languages; by tripling the footprint of its workforce-development training program; and by opening three skills centers in the United States and South Africa. It’s continuing to add new resources to the training portfolio.

The company, which held another of its summits this week in New York, also just unveiled five new generative AI capabilities for developers, data scientists and, to some degree, ordinary business users.

Behemoth consultancy Deloitte has inked a new strategic collaboration agreement with AWS around generative AI, even as the companies already have been working together on the technology.

“This initiative will usher the next generation of this promising technology into production and help improve the operational efficiencies of the enterprise,” said Dounia Senawi, chief commercial officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Now, Deloitte and AWS will work together to build an Innovation Lab, which will cover domains including quantum machine learning and autonomous robotics. The lab will develop industry-specific solutions for verticals including financial services and health care, among many others.

As part of the new arrangement, Deloitte and AWS will co-sell as well as deliver funding to customers taking joint proofs of concept to the production stage. Such incentives have turned into common tactics among cloud providers trying to lure end users, especially those with large and demanding workloads.

AWS' Ruba Borno

“Customers across industries are seeking to understand the full transformative potential of generative AI to generate value for their business,” said Ruba Borno, vice president of the global specialist and partner organization at AWS. “Our collaboration with Deloitte has accelerated industry innovation with customers by combining technical and industry experience, along with the choice and the flexibility for customers to use a combination of different foundation models for their specific use cases.”

Deloitte has ranked as an AWS premier tier services partner for seven years. It launched its generative AI practice in 2023.

DigitalOcean has hired Wade Wegner to take on a “unique and critical” role — that of chief ecosystem and growth officer.

The position, per DigitalOcean, bridges the gap between research and development and go-to-market strategy. As such, Wegner is responsible for marketing, growth, partnerships and developer relations.

DigitalOcean's Wade Wegner

“Wade is a transformative technology leader who blends deep technical expertise with strategic vision,” said Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean. “He brings robust developer relations and developer ecosystem experience to our team, at a time when the development landscape is rapidly evolving with AI/ML.”

Wegner’s career DNA includes time at Microsoft, Salesforce, Twilio and RapidAPI.

“I'm committed to driving innovation that empowers developers and startups, making cloud computing more accessible in an age of AI for creators worldwide,” Wegner said.

AI platform developer Vast Data said this week its platform has attained critical Nvidia certification that will trickle down to its cloud service provider partners.

“With the … platform independently validated and certified through the Nvidia Partner Network, organizations can more confidently and securely deploy their AI models at unprecedented scale across thousands of GPUs,” said John Mao, vice president of technology alliances at Vast Data. 

Vast specializes in storage and data services. CSPs use the company to deliver their own AI-powered data capabilities and services.

Nvidia, of course, has been announcing myriad partnerships with seemingly every cloud provider on the planet as gen AI takes hold.

Mission Cloud, which sells through the channel, this week released software for optimizing AWS environments.

Mission Cloud Gateway combines AWS expertise, guidance and tools for cloud cost management and governance, the New York-based company said.

"We've distilled years of cloud expertise into a single platform that enables enterprises to manage complex AWS environments all in one place,” said Ted Stuart, president and chief operating officer at Mission Cloud. “Mission Cloud Gateway isn't just about optimization — it’s about giving organizations the insights and tools they need to make smarter decisions, reduce unnecessary spending and drive innovation.”

Such capabilities have grown more crucial amid the skyrocketing demand for cloud computing, which powers generative AI. Companies often find that relying on a cloud computing provider’s internal optimization tools leaves holes that lead to unnecessary spending. Thus, many turn to more independent, third-party providers for holistic cloud optimization and management platforms; Mission Cloud simply has joined the fray. 

Mission Cloud Gateway is sold in the AWS Marketplace.

News from NetApp is the caboose in this week’s cloud computing roundup. 

The data-centric vendor on July 10 introduced new capabilities for cloud workloads including generative AI and VMware.

“Strategic workloads, including gen AI and virtualized environments, are driving business innovation and have increasingly complex and resource-intensive infrastructure requirements that are pushing IT teams to the limit,” said Pravjit Tiwana, senior vice president and general manager of cloud storage at NetApp. 

The solution, Tiwana said, comes in the form of NetApp’s new resources. Those include, but are not limited to:

IDC's Archana Venkatraman

“NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure capabilities can help customers overcome the data challenges and offer specific guidance to automate workflows that can securely feed private data directly into public cloud providers’ LLMs,” said Archana Venkatraman, senior research director of cloud data management at IDC. “In addition, NetApp’s BlueXP data classification capability has the potential to mitigate the risks in data operations for AI because it allows users to discover and categorize data so that the right data is fed into the right model without exposing confidential, personal or restricted information.”

News from NetApp is the caboose in this week’s cloud computing roundup. 

The data-centric vendor on July 10 introduced new capabilities for cloud workloads including generative AI and VMware.

“Strategic workloads, including gen AI and virtualized environments, are driving business innovation and have increasingly complex and resource-intensive infrastructure requirements that are pushing IT teams to the limit,” said Pravjit Tiwana, senior vice president and general manager of cloud storage at NetApp. 

The solution, Tiwana said, comes in the form of NetApp’s new resources. Those include, but are not limited to:

IDC's Archana Venkatraman

“NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure capabilities can help customers overcome the data challenges and offer specific guidance to automate workflows that can securely feed private data directly into public cloud providers’ LLMs,” said Archana Venkatraman, senior research director of cloud data management at IDC. “In addition, NetApp’s BlueXP data classification capability has the potential to mitigate the risks in data operations for AI because it allows users to discover and categorize data so that the right data is fed into the right model without exposing confidential, personal or restricted information.”