Cloud computing

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Oracle Corp. believes it can beat Salesforce.com Inc. and challenge Amazon Web Services, but the numbers don’t seem to support that bluster. Oracle ORCL, -3.62%  gave an update in its race to $10 billion with Salesforce CRM, +0.07%   on Thursday, showing revenue for its cloud business topped $1 billion for the first time in the fiscal second quarter, thanks to a 62% year-over-year surge. In the first half of fiscal 2017, Oracle has reported $2 billion in total cloud revenue, at a growth rate of 61%, figures that include its infrastructure-as-a-service business.

Oracle keeps saying it can beat Salesforce and AWS, but numbers say otherwise - MarketWatch

The firm reported $687 million in operating income on $2.4 billion in revenue for AWS, making it a comparatively more profitable venture than the part of the firm that includes its retail arm. That has come even as it aggressively slashed prices to generate new business. Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said that AWS revenue for the year was on track to be "just short" of $10 billion by the end of its fourth quarter.

The cloud wars are seriously heating up - The Washington Post

Check out this long track record of picking winners in the fast-moving technology sector. Here's the next in line: Tech Data Corp. (TECD - Get Report) . The Clearwater, Fla.-based company is one of the world's largest wholesale distributors of technology products and services. Its advanced logistics capabilities and other services enable 120,000 resellers in more than 100 countries to support the various technology needs of their customers.

This Little-Known Tech Stock Could Be Your Best Opportunity Right Now in Cloud Computing - TheStreet

Microsoft (MSFT) shares are up $1.07, or 1.8%, at $60.72, after Goldman Sachs’s Heather Bellini upgraded the stock to a Buy from neutral, and raised her price target to $68 from $60, as part of a mammoth 72-page report on the future of “public” cloud computing.

Microsoft to Ride Cloud’s Disruption of Half a Trillion in IT Spend, Says Goldman - Tech Trader Daily - Barrons.com

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In a previous article, I explained some of that jargon and highlighted three key cloud stocks - Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT),Salesforce (NYSE:CRM). Today, I'll review ten key industry stats that should give investors a better grasp on the growth of the cloud computing market. 1. The worldwide cloud computing market grew 21% to $110 billion in 2015 according to Synergy Research Group. That total includes cloud infrastructure services, software services, and hardware.

10 Cloud Computing Stats that Will Blow You Away -- The Motley Fool

The competition might be making some noise, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still in a league of its own in terms of the features and services its public cloud infrastructure can provide to customers of all sizes and backgrounds.

Amazon Shows Its Cloud Business Is Still in a League of Its Own - TheStreet

Salesforce (CRM +0.2%) to utilize AWS (AMZN +0.1%) infrastructure in Canada, marking the first AWS region to become supported as part of Salesforce's international infrastructure efforts. Delivery to customers of Salesforce's Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and other services on the the infrastructure will be enabled. Mid-2017 availability of the integrations is anticipated. Further related alliances are noted to be expected.

Amazon Web Services, Salesforce extend cloud infrastructure partnership - Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) | Seeking Alpha

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Microsoft is expanding its IoT offerings, announcing three new services that augment its cloud-based Azure IoT suite. Here's what's new: The firm launched IoT Central, a new service that can deploy and manage the entirety of a company's IoT ecosystem, including the devices, cloud functionality, analytics, networks, and software. Microsoft's offering is essentially IoT-as-a-service and is one of the only solutions on the market that can manage all these aspects in full. Microsoft is also updating Azure IoT offerings. It's expanding Azure Stream Analytics, an existing platform, to edge computing systems, which analyze data where it's generated rather than in the cloud or at remote data centers. Microsoft is also launching a new tool, based on an existing Azure offering, that leverages the cloud to analyze time-series data, something commonplace in the IoT. This gives Microsoft customers more tools that allow them to analyze data more quickly than they could with the company's previous offerings.

Microsoft is expanding its IoT offerings - Business Insider

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Nvidia announced the launch of a cloud service for developers to train artificial intelligence models. But the company, whose stock has been on a tear this week, already sells its graphics processing units to the biggest cloud companies to do just that. What it means is that Nvidia plans to directly compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure, and Alphabet's Google Cloud Platform.

Nvidia to compete against Amazon and Google in cloud

Microsoft's Cortana isn't the trendiest voice-activated personal assistant — that title goes to Amazon's Alexa — and its Azure public cloud plays second fiddle to Amazon Web Services. On Tuesday at the company's annual Build conference in Seattle, Microsoft executives spent hours showing how they plan to change that. CEO Satya Nadella also pointed out one edge that Microsoft still has over Amazon: its massive reach in enterprises. People who use Windows machines and Cortana are "the most valuable set of users in the core of the enterprise," Nadella said. People are using Windows 10 on more than 500 million devices every month, while Cortana now has 140 million monthly active users.

Microsoft Build recap: catching up with Amazon

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Michael Dell said his company is seeing some customers return to buying equipment after discovering that working with the giant cloud-computing providers is more complicated and costlier than they thought.  Hardware from Dell Technologies Inc. is getting a second look from companies finding that outsourcing their computing needs to the public cloud—big providers such as Amazon.com Inc., and Microsoft Corp.—can be twice as expensive or more as running it themselves, Dell said Monday. While he didn't provide specifics,  Dell added "it's not small numbers; it's large numbers."

Dell Says 'Large' Number of Companies Return after Pricey Public Cloud - Bloomberg

Box, a popular cloud storage company for businesses, now employs machine learning to allow its service to peek into files and figure out what they contain. The idea is to let users search for, say, every press release related to a particular product, or the minutes from a string of important meetings, or even photos of the CEO dancing at the last office holiday party. This would be a compelling new way for individuals and companies to search for and organize their data. It also shows the potential for cutting-edge AI techniques to change the nature of everyday office work.

Rejoice, Disorganized Workers: This Smart Cloud Looks After Your Files For You

Cloudera Inc., the big-data company backed by Intel Corp., hired underwriters for an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, people with knowledge of the matter said. The company, based in Palo Alto, California, is eyeing a valuation of about $4.1 billion, said the people, in line with what it fetched in its last private round three years ago. Cloudera notified a number of firms this month that they’d been picked to lead the IPO, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

Cloudera Said to Choose Banks for IPO as Soon as This Year - Bloomberg

We’ve been using compute-intensive machine learning in our products for the past 15 years. We use it so much that we even designed an entirely new class of custom machine learning accelerator, the Tensor Processing Unit. Just how fast is the TPU, actually? Today, in conjunction with a TPU talk for a National Academy of Engineering meeting at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, we’re releasing a study that shares new details on these custom chips, which have been running machine learning applications in our data centers since 2015. This first generation of TPUs targeted inference (the use of an already trained model, as opposed to the training phase of a model, which has somewhat different characteristics), and here are some of the results we’ve seen

Google Cloud Platform Blog: Quantifying the performance of the TPU, our first machine learning chip

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Please be aware when looking at this comparison of the leading public cloud providers: few of the services truly line up in an “apples-to-apples” similar style. Whether it’s storage or container or analytic technologies the differences between the top public cloud vendors are distinct enough to not fit completely in a chart. Still, the chart below should help you get started.

Top Public Cloud Providers - Datamation

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure dominate the infrastructure-as-a-service field, according to Gartner, which released its IaaS Magic Quadrant. However, Google Cloud is emerging as a key challenger. Gartner's Magic Quadrant focuses specifically on infrastructure -- and not platform --or software-as-a-service. IaaS is defined as a standardized, automated service where storage, compute and networking are offered by a service provider on demand. Here's a look at Gartner's rankings.

Gartner puts AWS, Microsoft Azure top of its Magic Quadrant for IaaS | ZDNet

As for Google Cloud Platform, Gartner said the company is a distant third, but it's a good option for cloud-native companies. Gartner also said that Google's emphasis on portability and its innovation engine is critical. However, Google is often chosen as a secondary provider and an alternative to AWS, said Gartner. Google has been investing heavily in analytics and its ecosystem and those moves should pay off in the future. On IBM, Gartner focused on the SoftLayer infrastructure, which is currently being reengineered. Gartner also noted that IBM hasn't improved SoftLayer's infrastructure since buying it in 2015. "The IBM Cloud experience is currently disjointed," said Gartner. Another player worth watching is Alibaba Cloud, which was among the best of the rest in IaaS. Gartner sees Alibaba Cloud as a key way to play in China and its current offering show a lot of potential in the future, said Gartner. Outside of China, however, Alibaba Cloud has a limited track record.

Gartner puts AWS, Microsoft Azure top of its Magic Quadrant for IaaS | ZDNet

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Fasten your harnesses, because the era of cloud computing’s giant data centers is about to be rear-ended by the age of self-driving cars. Here’s the problem: When a self-driving car has to make snap decisions, it needs answers fast. Even slight delays in updating road and weather conditions could mean longer travel times or dangerous errors. But those smart vehicles of the near-future don’t quite have the huge computing power to process the data necessary to avoid collisions, chat with nearby vehicles about optimizing traffic flow, and find the best routes that avoid gridlocked or washed-out roads. The logical source of that power lies in the massive server farms where hundreds of thousands of processors can churn out solutions. But that won’t work if the vehicles have to wait the 100 milliseconds or so it usually takes for information to travel each way to and from distant data centers. Cars, after all, move fast.

The Cloud Computing Era Could Be Nearing Its End | WIRED