Microsoft has announced an agreement to acquire Affirmed Networks, the “virtualized, cloud-native mobile network” startup.
The acquisition will help Microsoft as networks transition to 5G. In the past, “wireless networks have been based on purpose-built hardware,” writes Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President, Azure Networking. “We believe that with innovation in software and by making use of broadly available cloud computing platforms like Microsoft Azure, operators can deploy and maintain 5G networks and services more efficiently, more cost effectively, more rapidly and more securely.”
That’s where Affirmed Networks comes in. The company offers “Affirmed UnityCloud™ 5g core (5gc) is a cloud-native solution built on an open, webscale architecture that enables mobile operators to build the most innovative 5GC network, and dramatically reduce the costs of operating the network up to 90% by simplifying and automating network functions. UnityCloud converges ‘Any G’, including 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G core networks, and wireline core, onto one unified platform, greatly simplifying the overall network architecture.”
Combined with Azure, Affirmed Networks’ platforms will give Microsoft an edge in the competitive 5G landscape.
In the race to create a COVID-19 vaccine, Rescale has partnered with both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Rescale is a leader in enterprise big compute and is offering its high performance computing resources to research teams working on vaccines or test kits—at no cost. Thanks to the partnerships, “researchers can rapidly run simulations in the cloud without setup time or IT teams using Rescale’s turnkey platform combined with cloud computing resources from Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.”
Another significant advantage of the cloud partnership is the ability for research teams around the globe to seamlessly collaborate and combine their efforts.
“Rescale’s platform can provide access to high-performance computing resources that can help accelerate key processes and enable stronger collaboration,” said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. “As a partner of Rescale, we’re grateful that they will make these resources, including Google Cloud computing capabilities, available to more researchers and organizations.”
Greg Moore, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health added, “We’re inspired to team up with Rescale in the fight against time to help provide answers to address COVID-19. To enable researchers and organizations to develop new therapeutics and vaccines faster, we’re working together to accelerate the availability of Azure supercomputers in the cloud.”
Rescale is to be commended for offering their HPC resources at no cost to researchers who are desperately trying to develop vaccines and more efficient ways of testing. The announcement is also a prime example of how the coronavirus pandemic is hastening a large-scale migration to cloud computing.
Microsoft beat analysts expectations with its quarterly results, with particularly good news coming from the cloud front, according to Bloomberg.
Overall the company reported revenue of $36.9 billion, a 14% increase over last year. Operating income was $13.9 billion, representing an increase of 35% and net income was $11.6 billion.
One of the big takeaways, however, was the impact Microsoft’s Azure business had on the company. Azure’s revenue grew 62% over last year. According to AP News, “Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini said in a note to investors Wednesday that Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing business has been growing faster than the broader cloud market.”
This substantiates earlier reports that Microsoft is making significant headway against AWS in the cloud wars, with a far greater percentage of companies planning on deploying Azure than either AWS or Google Cloud.
It also seems that securing the Pentagon’s JEDI contract is having the desired ‘halo effect.’ According to AP News, “Mizuho analyst Gregg Moskowitz said in a note that the JEDI cloud contract was a game-changer for Microsoft that goes beyond its likely $10 billion in revenue over the next decade. He said it could also serve as a template leading to broader adoption by other government agencies and business customers.”
Despite AWS’ commanding lead in the cloud market, it no longer seems a stretch that Microsoft could soon take the lead from AWS.
Business Insider is reporting that RBC Capital Markets Managing Director Alex Zukin believes Microsoft could unseat AWS as the dominant cloud player.
AWS currently holds a commanding lead in the market, with some 47.8% market share. In spite of that, Amazon’s status as a leading retailer is proving to be a handicap, especially when trying to win business from companies that compete with it.
“There’s the perception that Amazon has access to all your data and owns all your data,” Zukin told Business Insider. “That perception does sometimes get in the way of signing large long term strategic engagement in some industries that Amazon is particularly competitive with.”
Zukin cites the example of Walmart, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors, who is using Microsoft’s Azure primarily because it’s not AWS.
In addition to the competitive factor, there’s also the barrier-to-entry many developers experience with AWS. AWS is one of the most comprehensive cloud platforms available, but it also has a reputation for being difficult to use. Often its tools are better suited to hard-core programmers than business IT departments. In contrast, Microsoft has deep roots in the consumer and business industries, with a heavy focus on making things as easy as possible for non-programmers. This gives it a major advantage over AWS.
There have been multiple reports recently that Microsoft is gaining significant ground in the cloud market. There have also been previous reports that this is, at least in part, because companies trust Microsoft more than a company they routinely compete with. As a result, Microsoft’s momentum seems to be picking up speed at a rate that should be alarming to Amazon, as well as others. If Amazon wants to retain its spot as the dominant cloud player, it will need to address the issues threatening to unseat it.
Fresh off of winning the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company is expecting a “halo effect,” according to Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi.
“Halo effect” was a term used frequently in regard to Apple products, starting with the iPod. If customers liked the iPod enough, and were impressed with the Apple experience, it might entice them to purchase a Mac. That halo effect has since expanded to iPhones, iPads and Watches. Microsoft is now in a position to generate a halo effect of its own in the cloud market.
While Windows may be the dominant player in the desktop market, it’s a distant second in the cloud arena, with 15.5% compared with AWS’ 47.8% market share. A significant deal—not to mention Microsoft’s recent Impact Level 6 Pentagon security certification—could entice other government agencies to invest in the software giant for their cloud needs, creating an ever-expanding halo effect. Nadella believes the JEDI contract could do just that, but also emphasized the need to stay grounded and not become overly confident.
“Any big deal has a halo effect,” Nadella told Sozzi in an exclusive interview. “But to me, the most important thing is not to take any deal you won as some guarantee for future success but to stay humble, stay grounded on what we need to continue to do, which is be obsessed about customer needs. That’s what got us here.”
Business Insider is reporting Google Cloud is taking the unprecedented step of inviting partners to its annual Accelerate sales event.
The move underscores how important Google’s cloud business is, as it seeks to gain ground against Amazon and Microsoft. Latest estimates place Amazon’s AWS at 47.8% market share, Microsoft Azure at 15.5%, while Google Cloud holds a distant 4%. There has even been speculation Google may purchase Salesforce in an effort to bolster its cloud business and leapfrog Microsoft.
As Business Insider points out, partners are an invaluable part of the cloud business and Google is looking to Accelerate as a way to help bring partners “deeper into the fold.”
Tony Safoian, president and CEO of Google Cloud partner SADA Systems, told Business Insider: “It delivers on the promise of the journey with Google Cloud, to treat partners as an extension of themselves by inviting them to their sales kickoff, which has never been allowed before.”
As Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian pursues the stated goal of Google becoming the number two cloud vendor within five years, it’s a safe bet this Accelerate is only the beginning as Google continues to cultivate strong partner relationships.
According to Business Insider, RBC Capital Markets believes Google may purchase Salesforce and use it to better take on Amazon and Microsoft.
Google is currently a distant third among U.S. cloud providers. As of 2019, Gartner estimates Amazon’s AWS has some 47.8% of the market, Microsoft Azure accounted for 15.5% and Google Cloud brought up the rear with a mere 4%.
Even worse, a recent report shows that 97 percent of companies polled are using Azure to some degree, and far more companies are planning to deploy Microsoft’s cloud platform than are planning to use AWS or Google. While Amazon has room to lose market share, Google Cloud does not.
According to Business Insider, a source said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has the goal of Google becoming “at least the No. 2 cloud.” For that to happen, however, the company will need to gain significant ground. RBC doesn’t see that happening without making a major move.
“We don’t see a viable organic way to get there,” said the RBC note.
If Google does purchase Salesforce, RBC estimates the deal could be worth as much as $250 billion. While expensive, it would catapult the company into the No. 2 spot.
According to Business Insider, a recent Goldman Sachs poll shows Microsoft making significant inroads into the cloud market at Amazon and especially Google’s expense.
Goldman Sachs polled 100 IT executives from Global 2000 companies to see what cloud platforms were in the best position moving forward. The results showed that while Amazon’s “AWS still gets the largest share of cloud revenue, a ‘significantly higher number of respondents’ indicated they use Microsoft Azure and plan to in the next three years.” In fact, “97 respondents said they are currently using Microsoft Azure, compared to 58 using AWS and 25 using Google Cloud Platform.”
This should be deeply worrying to Amazon and Google. Amazon recently lost out to Microsoft in the bid for a Pentagon contract valued at $10 billion. Microsoft is also the second company to achieve the coveted Impact Level 6 security clearance—behind Amazon—allowing it to store sensitive government data in the cloud. Achieving that clearance will only improve the company’s odds of scoring other major contracts in the future.
With Microsoft currently being used in so many companies, and the inherent advantage it has due to its established software ecosystem, Amazon and Google will have their work cut out trying to avoid losing any more market share.
According to Windows Latest, a recent LinkedIn job posting would seem to indicate that Microsoft is working on a version of Windows 10X for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Windows 10X is a version of Windows designed specifically for multi-screen hardware. The operating system (OS) will power the Surface Neo, expected in 2020, and is based on Windows Core OS. Windows Core OS is Microsoft’s effort to unify the different versions of Windows, running on different hardware. By having a single, core OS, it’s much easier for the company to then make minor adjustments to specific implementations to accommodate different hardware profiles.
According to the job posting, the successful candidate “will build the next generation IoT operating system based on Windows 10X.”
Not surprisingly, the job will be part of the Azure team, as Microsoft continues to make headway against Amazon’s AWS.
“Do you want to participate in enabling the intelligent edge vision with the Azure Core OS IoT team? The IoT team is on an exciting journey to enable industry platforms with a highly secure and supported OS that enables intelligent computing on diverse silicon at the edge….The team owns software stack both on the edge and complimentary services on the cloud that power innovative secure offerings like the recently announced ROS on Windows and Trusted Cyber Physical Systems. Our team is right at the forefront of defining and implementing what edge intelligence and computing looks like on IoT devices.”
A version of Windows 10X for IoT devices could be a big help to Microsoft’s Azure efforts, by giving administrators a common platform to work with.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have lost out on a lucrative Pentagon contract, but it has scored a major deal to oversee trading in the U.S. securities market.
According to a press release, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) selected AWS to be its cloud provider for the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT).
“The CAT will allow regulators to improve securities market surveillance by creating an extensive audit trail of order information for all U.S. equity securities and listed options across U.S. markets and trading venues. Leveraging AWS’s storage, compute, database, analytics, and security services, CAT ingests more than 100 billion market events per day, pulling together data from 22 stock exchanges and 1,500 broker dealer firms, enabling the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs) to analyze CAT data.”
Past experience with AWS, as well as its reputation for reliability were major factors in the decision.
“We are responsible for providing regulators with a consolidated view of the markets, so security, scalability, and resiliency are at the forefront of the design for the CAT platform,” said Scott Donaldson, FINRA CAT Chief Technology Officer. “FINRA has deep and tested experience in creating such an environment on AWS, and in view of that track record, FINRA CAT is pleased to select AWS for this major project.”
“The CAT will provide a single comprehensive view of U.S equities and listed options markets, as well as new tools to reconstruct market activity and maintain fair and orderly trading systems,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. “To implement this important regulatory initiative, FINRA CAT chose AWS to deliver a highly scalable, robust, and secure system that will enable regulators to improve securities market analysis. We are collaborating to ensure that FINRA CAT can deliver an industry leading platform that provides accessibility and transparency of capital markets data to protect investors and the integrity of the financial market.”
The contract is a huge win for the company, which is still smarting over its loss to Microsoft in the bid for the Pentagon contract. Amazon has maintained it only lost out on that deal due to interference from the White House, and that its platform is far superior to Microsoft Azure.
Whether AWS is better or not depends more on the needs and requirements of any given project. But, at least for FINRA, AWS is the best choice to help oversee “100 billion market events per day.”
“VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud,” says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen. “It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.”
Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMWare, discusses the incredible growth of VMWare which is driven by their ability to connect companies to any and every cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Software Is Defining Everything
We had a great quarter. You have to put the bigger picture in perspective. We’re in the golden age of software where software is defining everything. Software companies, in general, are doing well. What we have done as a company is focus on making the datacenter software-driven and we think there is a bright future there. We showed some examples of that in hyperconverged (HCI) and in software-defined networking (SDN).
We also showed some incredible momentum with our partnerships in the hybrid-cloud. Amazon is obviously first and preferred there. We announced a partnership with Azure. There is also the digital workspace which is all of the devices. We think our future is bright and we just have to keep executing. Our view is always the long-run.
In This Software Future We Are Not Tethered To One Company
I think there is a little bit of a misperception that we should nip in the bud (regarding correlating Dell’s earnings with VMWare). First off, VMWare’s business with Dell in these areas like hyperconverged, we’ve now surpassed companies like Nutanix who are number one in hyper-converged infrastructure, and in the digital workspace where we are partnering with Dell Laptops, those are going very well. We want Dell and VMWare to do well together. In the datacenter we work with Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, etc. There is no one hardware player that is the majority of our business.
In cloud we work with AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and IBM. You won’t find another company that has got as many hybrid-cloud partners. In the digital workspace, we work with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In this software future, we are not tethered to one company. We are optimized to Dell, we are not tethered to them. You need a software-based solution for any of these areas, the datacenter, the cloud, or the digital workspace during tough times and in good times.
It Is a Multi-Cloud World
You should think about applications like mobile homes. They’re going to move from the datacenter to the cloud on this freeway called VMWare. The mobile home could go to one cloud and may come back. VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud. We make the hardware datacenter look like Amazon. Now if you are an Amazon customer, and they have 30-35 percent market share, number one in the market for cloud, they are our preferred cloud partner, we can help customers. We have many customers who are adopting VMWare cloud in AWS.
For those customers who said we are not an Amazon shop, for example, we quoted Walmart in our earnings announcement, they are using Azure. They have an option now because we announced a partnership with Azure. There are some customers that are going to have some other clouds. It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.
IBM is a great partner of VMWare. We love their services business. IBM Cloud has 2,000+ customers. We are going to partner really well with Ginni Rometty and the team. We compete with a small part of Red Hat’s business in containers. Over 80 percent of Red Hat’s business is Linux, a good part of their business which is OpenShift and JBoss, is not doing so well. The future of containers is a small part of the business. We can walk and chew gum. We can partner with IBM and compete with that small part of Red Hat and that’s our focus. We want a big tent at VMWare. We want to partner with as many people as possible and compete with as few people as possible.
Make Your Story Sesame Street Simple
First off, if you want to serve your customers well start by serving your employees. One of my professors at the Harvard Business School, Len Schlesinger, wrote an article and book on service profit chain. What he talked about is if you want to create shareholder value focus not just on customer satisfaction but satisfied employees. Hug your start. Take care of the best and brightest who come in there.
The second one is something that all of us can do which is make your story Sesame Street simple. All too often, I see product managers and account executives blabbering on with PowerPoints. Let’s tell the story just like you are telling the story to your mother or to your kids. Ironically, when you make things simple you’re going back to the basic principals of Steven Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People. It’s not that complicated. Have customer empathy.
It Is a Multi-Cloud World, Says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen
Business Insider is reporting that Microsoft is building out a new team of technical trainers to help customers at all levels of proficiency.
Microsoft and Amazon are locked in a bitter rivalry in the cloud computing business. While Amazon’s market share was three times that of Microsoft in 2018, Microsoft is making impressive headway. Most recently, the company beat out Amazon for a Pentagon contract with $10 billion.
One area where Azure can continue to take market share away from AWS is by appealing to non-technical audiences. AWS is widely viewed as more complicated than Azure, with a much higher barrier-to-entry. If Microsoft can successfully appeal to non-technical users, including those just looking to migrate to the cloud, they will continue to chip away at AWS’ lead.
The new team of trainers is a significant step toward that goal, as it will help Microsoft educate and train customers at every stage of their journey with Azure. This is especially important as the company appeals to non-developers, or casual developers, in addition to professionals. Microsoft’s ultimate goal appears to be enabling non-developers to take full advantage of the platform with minimal, or even no, coding required.
NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups have partnered to help accelerate AI startups, according to a press release.
The two companies unveiled their joint focus in Helsinki, at the startup event Slush. The partnership will aid companies in the AI market, working to address the unique challenges they face.
As part of the program, “members of NVIDIA Inception and Microsoft for Startups can now receive all the benefits of both programs — including technology, training, go-to-market support and NVIDIA GPU credits in the Azure cloud — to continue growing and solving some of the world’s most complex problems.”
The two companies will work closely to evaluate what startups in the program need, and address those needs using available resources.
“NVIDIA Inception members are eligible for the following benefits from Microsoft for Startups:
Free access to specific Microsoft technologies suited to every startup’s needs, including up to $120,000 in free credits in the Azure cloud
Go-to-market resources to help startups sell alongside Microsoft’s global sales channels
“Microsoft for Startups members can access the following benefits from NVIDIA Inception:
Technology expertise on implementing GPU applications and hardware
Free access to NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute online courses, such as “Fundamentals of Deep Learning for Computer Vision” and “Accelerating Data Science”
Unlimited access to DevTalk, a forum for technical inquiries and community engagement
Go-to-market assistance and hardware discounts across the NVIDIA portfolio, from NVIDIA DGX AI systems to NVIDIA Jetson embedded computing platforms”
With NVIDIA and Microsoft’s focus on the AI market, the two companies will bring valuable expertise and resources to burgeoning startups.
Google announced in a blog post today that it has acquired CloudSimple, a company once central to Microsoft’s cloud ambitions.
CloudSimple is a “secure, high performance, dedicated environment in Public Clouds to run VMware workloads.” Google struck a partnership with CloudSimple in August, following a convoluted series of events.
Microsoft, in an effort to catch up with AWS, needed to bring on as many VMware customers as possible to its cloud solutions. CloudSimple was created by Guru Pangal, an entrepreneur who spent four years working for Microsoft on Azure. Microsoft and VMware had been rivals for some time. As a result, Microsoft’s plan was to use the newly created CloudSimple—also a VMware partner—as a conduit to migrate VMware workloads to Azure.
Michael Dell, CEO of the company bearing his name, stepped in to help smooth things out between the two companies, helping Microsoft secure formal permission to run VMware on Azure. As part of the deal, however, Dell-owned Virtustream became the recommended method of migrating VMware to Azure, leaving CloudSimple out in the cold.
Google saw an opportunity and formed a partnership with CloudSimple in August with the aim of helping companies migrate onsite VMware workloads to Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple.
“Through our existing partnership with CloudSimple, our customers can migrate their VMware workloads from on-premises datacenters directly into Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, while also creating new VMware workloads as needed. Their apps can run exactly the same as they have been on-premises, but with all the benefits of the cloud, like performance, elasticity, and integration with key cloud services and technologies. And best of all, customers can do all this without having to re-architect existing VMware-based applications and workloads, which helps them operate more efficiently and reduce costs, while also allowing IT staff to maintain consistency and use their existing VMware tools, workflows and support. To that end, we believe in a multi-cloud world and will continue to provide choice for our customers to use the best technology in their journey to the cloud.”
Now that Google has acquired CloudSimple, it will be interesting to see if it can makeup lost ground against rivals Microsoft and Amazon.
At its Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft announced the release of Azure Arc, a tool designed to allow developers to deploy Azure programs to Amazon and Google clouds.
Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, Microsoft has taken a completely different approach to competitors. Rather than viewing other companies as the enemy and doing everything possible to keep users locked into the Windows ecosystem, the company has focused on making the best software possible and deploying it as widely as possible.
This approach has led to a renewed focus on Office for the Mac, industry-leading versions of the productivity suite for iOS and Android, not to mention the company reaching out to Linux developers for help in porting Edge. Now, as the cloud wars heat up, it appears Microsoft is taking that same all-embracing approach to competing cloud platforms. Azure Arc will not only help companies deploy their Azure programs, but also help them manage them regardless of where they are run from.
“Azure Arc enables Azure services anywhere and extends Azure management to any infrastructure for unified management, governance and control across clouds, datacenters and edge. They look and feel just like Azure resources, and they provide unified auditing, compliance, and role-based access control across multiple environments and at scale.
“As a result, customers can modernize any infrastructure with cloud management and security protection. With cloud practices that work anywhere, Microsoft is delivering these resources, from cloud to datacenter to edge, and enabling cloud security anywhere.
“Millions of Azure resources are managed, governed, and secured daily by thousands of customers. With Azure Arc, customers can now take advantage of Azure’s robust cloud management experience for their own servers (Linux and Windows Server) and Kubernetes clusters by extending Azure management across environments. Customers can seamlessly inventory, organize, and govern their own resources at-scale through a consistent and unified experience through the Azure Portal.”
On the heels of news that Microsoft beat out Amazon for a lucrative defense contract, the Azure Arc announcement is further evidence the company is firing on all cylinders in its execution of Nadella’s strategy.
Microsoft pulled off an upset, beating Amazon for a defense contract valued as high as $10 billion.
According to a statement by the U.S. Department of Defense, Microsoft emerged the winner of the JEDI Cloud contract. The win is a major step in Microsoft’s attempts to take on Amazon, widely regarded as the industry leader. It’s also a testament to how far the Azure platform has matured to become a viable competitor to AWS.
“The JEDI Cloud contract will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support Department of Defense business and mission operations. Work performance will take place at the awardee’s place of performance. Fiscal 2020 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $1,000,000 are being obligated on a task order against this award to cover the minimum guarantee. The expected completion date is Oct. 24, 2029, if all options are exercised.”
Since CEO Satya Nadella took the reins from Steve Ballmer, he has increased the company’s focus on cloud computing and cross-platform interoperability, a strategy that has paid off as Microsoft navigates a more mobile, cloud-based industry. These kind of gains will likely lead more companies to take note of Microsoft’s offerings, further putting pressure on Amazon.
Adesto Technologies Corporation provides application-specific semiconductors and systems for the Internet of Things (IoT). In a press release today, Adesto announced it has joined Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT. This will allow customers to use Adesto’s SmartServer IoT on hardware and software designed to work with Microsoft Azure IoT services.
Adesto’s SmartServer IoT is a multi-protocol industrial edge server that helps customers easily connect their industrial data to Microsoft Azure IoT. At the same time, SmartServer IoT eases the challenges that go with integrating existing control and management systems with new sensing, analytics and predictive AI, acting as a go-between for the myriad of non-interoperable protocols.
From the Press Release:
“With SmartServer IoT, we are bringing to bear 30 years of industrial communications and networking expertise to dramatically simplify deployment of advanced IoT applications and reduce total cost of ownership in industrial settings,” said Apurba Pradhan, VP product marketing and management, Adesto. “SmartServer IoT enables system integrators, application developers and OEMs to maximize legacy infrastructure investments while accelerating toward Industry 4.0. Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT validates our ability to jumpstart customers’ industrial IoT implementations with pre-tested device and operating system combinations.”
“Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT extends our promise to bring IoT to business scale, starting with interoperable solutions from leading technology companies around the world,” said Jerry Lee, director of marketing for Azure Internet of Things, Microsoft Corp. “With trusted offerings and verified partners, Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT accelerates the deployment of IoT even further.”
Microsoft is competing with Amazon for the enterprise cloud by focusing on being more than just a technology provider. Julia White, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Azure Marketing, says that they are “helping companies with their transformation and not just being a technology vendor or a cloud vendor for them.”
Microsoft Corporate VP of Azure Marketing, Julia White, discussed Microsoft’s approach to the cloud and how they compare to Amazon in a recent interview which you can view below:
Microsoft Helping Companies in their Transformation to the Cloud
Azure works for companies because of our understanding of the enterprise and things like building hybrid, understanding that technology running across data centers, across the Edge, and in the public cloud and building that from the very beginning.
It’s also about our partnerships, these aren’t just customers, like Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, and Chevron. We are really partnering deeply with them with them helping them with their transformation and not just being a technology vendor or a cloud vendor for them. I think that those are some of the important reasons customers are choosing Azure.
How Can Microsoft Compete with Amazon?
Certainly, Amazon has been around longer but they have much more of a technology provider approach. We go in and talk to customers and engage with them in a long-term strategy. This isn’t just about selling them technology or using our cloud. How are you changing your business? What does it look like to have a connected car platform? What does it mean using AI for shell and finding better drilling processes?
It’s much more of a partnership on the business side and not just the technology. We have so much history in working with enterprise customers for over 40 years so we have a different point of view that we can bring to those customer engagements.
The Cloud is a $4 Trillion Market
I don’t see Google a lot in our customer engagements. I think Amazon certainly had the first come market leadership position, but I don’t see the other vendors coming up very much. The cloud pie is so big, it’s almost unlimited total opportunity.
The cloud is about a $4 trillion market if you took what is being run on-premise today and where it’s going to the cloud. I’m not so worried about the other competition, rather what are we doing with customers to take advantage of that and really help them embrace that? It is an interesting time at this moment when there is effectively no threshold for growth.
AI is an Enablement of Humans
We spend a lot of time around AI ethics and AI for good and the approach we have had from the beginning is that AI is an enablement of humans and we should be using it in those ways. That is our investment, that is our focus, and that is how we are engaged with that technology.
It’s also important in playing our part in this industry as to how we shape this moving forward. It’s super important we do our part, but also bring the industry together on this.
Microsoft Cloud Security is World Class
One of the reasons I’m passionate about the cloud with our customers is because we are best set up to deal with this type of adversary (Russian election interference). We spend a billion dollars a year on cybersecurity across our cloud. We have 3,500 security engineers and that’s all they do. That is their lifeblood. Compared to any organization, even a large commercial well-funded organization, doesn’t have that kind of resource to be able to keep up with the threats.
It’s not people in basements trying to embarrass executives anymore, it is these nation-state threats. That’s why we invest at the level we do and that’s why I’m so passionate about getting our customers to take advantage of cloud-based security because it’s just better. Ultimately, security is a data game of who has better data and who has better insight.
Across all of Microsoft, we have signal coming from our billion Windows endpoints, or email system, the largest commercial email system, and the largest directory system. That gives us unique insight to understand what is good and bad intent.
Microsoft Azure customers were pleasantly surprised today. The cloud computing company just announced that it has substantially dropped the price for itsAzure Standard support to just $100 per month, making it the most affordable support package among the big three cloud computing firms.
The price slash of the Azure Standard support, which was previously priced at $300 per month, was announced in a post viaMicrosoft Azure’s website. Despite the drop, however, the company promised an even faster initial response time of 1 hour, which was previously set at 2 hours, for critical cases. The company also promised the continuation of the current package’s feature of unlimited 24/7 technical and billing support for the client’s entire organization.
The price cut is being offered to eligible Azure customers. These are customerswho purchased the Azure Standard support package directly from the Azure.com site under the Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement (MOSA).
However, the $100 per month offer is not applicable to all regions. For still unspecified reasons, customers based inGermany are apparently not included in the price cut.
Azure’s drastic price reduction for its Standard support could start a price war among the big three players in the cloud computing industry. It is possible that competitors Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as Google Cloud Platform, might be forced to introduce price cuts of their own to make the pricing of their services even more competitive.
At $100 per month, the AWS Business plan costs as much as the new Azure Standard support. However, that is only the starting price because clients usually end up paying more for additional charges based on their monthly usage fees.
Meanwhile, Google is charging a higher monthly rate for its standard support at the moment. Basic support costs $150 per month and its response time for business critical issues is even slower at 4 hours compared to 1 hour for Azure customers.
Microsoft’s Azure is finally gaining a foothold in the cloud computing niche with its market share jumping from 16 to 20 percent in the 4th quarter of 2017. The jump amounts to around $3.7 billion of its total revenue for the year. In contrast, Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw its market share drop from 68 to 62 percent in the same time frame.
The latest industry figures were provided by analysts from KeyBanc, a Cleveland-based boutique investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions.
With the cloud computing market still in its infancy, tech companies are busy positioning themselves to gain the upper hand in the lucrative niche. At the moment AWS is the dominant player, but this year will likely see many companies significantly expand their respective cloud computing divisions so as not to get left out of the emerging market.
Microsoft, for one, has already made sizable investments in Azure, gearing up for the inevitable competition. The company recently added a number of data centers in the UK and other parts of the globe. Factoring in Microsoft’s efforts, KeyBanc expects the Azure platform to grow rapidly, projecting a massive 88 percent increase by the end of 2018.
It’s fair to say Microsoft is on a buying spree in an effort to boost its market presence and clout. Recently, it acquired Avere Systems, a startup specializing in data storage solutions.
But as expected, AWS will not take the challenge sitting down. Last November, it announced a new partnership with Cerner, a firm specializing in offering technology solutions for the healthcare industry.
A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft’s data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the “The slow but eventual end of Moore’s Law.”
“Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man,” notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. “What’s more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter.”
The team created this system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that will significantly improve the speed of Bing and Azure queries. “This was a moonshot project that succeeded,” said Lanka.
What they did was insert an FPGA directly between the network and the servers, which in bypassing the traditional software approach speeds up computation. “What we’ve done now is we’ve made the FPGA the front door,” said Derek Chiou, one of the Microsoft engineers who created the system. ““I think a lot of people don’t know what FPGAs are capable of.”
Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability). In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.
We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds). This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication. By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network. Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger. The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively. The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft’s production datacenters worldwide.
perscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability). In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.
network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds). This architecture is much more scalable than