Cloud price wars resume as Microsoft cuts by up to 51 per cent • The Register

Microsoft has made another round of cuts to its cloudy costs, for both virtual machines and storage.Microsoft’s F-series VMs, which offer cores on a Xeon E5-2673 v3, are down by up to 23 per cent for Linux and 18 per cent for Windows machines.The A1 Basic VM, Microsoft’s second-wimpiest cloud server, is down by up to 42 per cent in a penguin-powered configuration or 51 per cent under Windows.Figuring out exact costs is hard because the figures Microsoft’s provided us pertain to price cuts in particular regions. And Microsoft has lots of those, detailed here on the Azure pricing page.Suffice to say the 51 per cent figure applies to the UK South region, which is good news given that just last December Microsoft said Brexit-inspired currency fluctuations made a price rise inevitable.Redmond has also cut storage prices, by up to 26 per cent for Hot Block Blobs and 38 per cent for Cool Block Blobs. Also on the storage front, you can now sample the new “Storage Service Encryption” that applies AES-256 to Azure File Storage.

Source: Cloud price wars resume as Microsoft cuts by up to 51 per cent • The Register

Microsoft expands artificial intelligence (AI) efforts with creation of new Microsoft AI and Research Group | News Center

REDMOND, Washington — Sept. 29, 2016 — Microsoft Corp. announced on Thursday it has formed the Microsoft AI and Research Group, bringing together Microsoft’s world-class research organization with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on the company’s AI product efforts. The new group will be led by computer vision luminary Harry Shum, a 20-year Microsoft veteran whose career has spanned leadership roles across Microsoft Research and Bing engineering.

Source: Microsoft expands artificial intelligence (AI) efforts with creation of new Microsoft AI and Research Group | News Center

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Says Amazon Is His Top Cloud Computing Rival

Ellison says Amazon is Oracle’s number one cloud computing competitor.Oracle wants the world to know it has Amazon in its sights.Larry Ellison, Oracle’s executive chairman, said Sunday during the company’s annual customer conference in San Francisco that he considers Amazon to be Oracle’s number one competitor when it comes to the business of selling computing capacity on demand, also known as cloud computing.Amazon Web Services is currently considered the leader in cloud computing, according to many technology analysts and observers. A recent Gartner report said that Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service holds more than double the amount of customer data than the next seven cloud service providers in total.

Source: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Says Amazon Is His Top Cloud Computing Rival

Amazon Still Reigns in Public Cloud But Microsoft Makes a Move – Fortune

Amazon Web Services still leads the league in public cloud adoption, but Microsoft Azure is making headway, according to a new survey. That AWS remains dominant is not shocking. But the report, by cloud management company RightScale, did show a shift in the makeup of Amazon’s customers. More big companies moved to the service, but that gain was offset as reported usage among smaller companies dropped.

Source: Amazon Still Reigns in Public Cloud But Microsoft Makes a Move – Fortune

Azure’s role in Microsoft’s IoT vision

Microsoft has fleshed out its strategy to position its cloud service as a key part of the internet of things fabric with the availability of Azure IoT Hub.

Source: Azure’s role in Microsoft’s IoT vision

Microsoft launches Azure IoT Hub service out of public preview on February 4 | VentureBeat | Cloud | by Jordan Novet

Microsoft today announced that its Azure IoT Hub — a cloud service for registering, managing, and communicating with Internet-connected devices — will become generally available tomorrow, February 4.

Source: Microsoft launches Azure IoT Hub service out of public preview on February 4 | VentureBeat | Cloud | by Jordan Novet

Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Microsoft Azure: Cloud Computing Competition | DC Inno

A Few quarters back, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had this to say about the Seattle cloud battle of Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure: “I don’t think of the comparison between Azure and AWS as the true North for me.” That’s a bit convenient, given how far Azure is behind AWS. The two cloud computing services—aimed at offering cheaper and faster-scaling computing capacity than physical servers—have been duking it out for years, but only recently did Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) start giving out the financial details for comparing the two services: • Microsoft Azure had revenue of about $400 million for the quarter ended June 30 (Microsoft’s fiscal Q4). Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services generated more than 4X that amount—$1.82 billion in revenue—during that quarter. • Microsoft didn’t disclose the details for the most recent quarter (ended at the close of September) but indicated there had been some growth over the previous quarter; AWS revenue for the most recent quarter was up to $2.08 billion, beating the prior growth expectations. By most accounts, Azure is playing an important role for Microsoft, as it’s behind much of the firm’s revenue expansion. And Nadella’s ascendancy to CEO can be tied to some degree to his previous success leading Microsoft’s infrastructure division, which includes Azure. Amazon was sowing the seeds for AWS to become a cloud powerhouse while Microsoft dallied. But to find out why Amazon Web Services—which employs quite a few at Amazon’s office in Herndon, Va.—is so far ahead of Microsoft Azure, we have to look back to the years of 2006-2010. That’s when Amazon was sowing the seeds for AWS to become a cloud powerhouse while Microsoft dallied. Microsoft, as Business Insider reports, only rolled out Azure in 2010 despite the fact that they’d been exploring concepts in cloud technology for years. Via the report: Microsoft “first treated the cloud as a novelty or a fad, and then as a threat. If customers moved to Amazon Web Services, they wouldn’t need as many copies of Microsoft software like Windows Server and SQL Server, which are multibillion-dollar products used in most companies’ data centers.”

Click below fore more.

Source: Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Microsoft Azure: Cloud Computing Competition | DC Inno

This Is Microsoft’s Big Secret Windows 10 Feature | TIME

The new system will be a bold entry into a massive new market When Microsoft announced this week that Windows 10 would be available July 29, Start Button devotees the world over rejoiced. But the return of everyone’s favorite app launcher is just one of many new features rolled into the forthcoming operating system. The biggest and most exciting element added to Windows computers is one that went largely unmentioned: smart home control. Microsoft announced last November Windows 10 would pack a technology called AllJoyn. An open source framework that encourages devices to be interoperable, AllJoyn was developed by the AllSeen Alliance, a group of more than 150 companies including the likes of Electrolux, Honeywell, LG, and Qualcomm that have banded together to make an open standard for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to speak to each other.

Source: This Is Microsoft’s Big Secret Windows 10 Feature | TIME

Microsoft Squeezes Windows 10 Into Internet of Things Devices

Microsoft has a new Windows 10 release for Internet of things (IoT) devices, specifically the Raspberry Pi 2 and the MinnowBoard Max maker boards.

Compact, customizable and affordable, computing boards like the Raspberry Pi 2 have attracted the attention of both technology enthusiasts and businesses. Their tiny dimensions, generous processing power (comparatively speaking) and developer-friendly attributes have catapulted the device category from hobbyist tools to IoT building blocks.

And Microsoft wants a piece of the action.

“Windows 10 IoT Core is a new edition for Windows targeted towards small, embedded devices that may or may not have screens,” said Steve Teixeira, director of program management for the Internet of Things group at Microsoft, in an Aug. 10 announcement. “For devices with screens, Windows 10 IoT Core does not have a Windows shell experience; instead you can write a Universal Windows app that is the interface and ‘personality’ for your device.”

More than a recently-released operating system for desktop PCs, tablets and 2-in-1s, Windows 10 is an ambitious effort by Microsoft to unify its software foundation across a wide variety of devices, including mobile phones, Xbox One, the massive Surface Hub all-in-one conference room system, the upcoming HoloLens augmented reality headset and now IoT hardware.

Click below for more.

via Microsoft Squeezes Windows 10 Into Internet of Things Devices.

The Fallacy Of Private Cloud: Are You Getting What You Paid For?

Are companies happy with their private clouds? There is growing evidence that while some organizations have built on-premise installations over the last few years, they have not gained all the benefits they had hoped they would. It’s what I consider to be the fallacy of private cloud.

What many companies think they are implementing as private cloud often turns out to be an IT relabeling of existing assets—at most, a box of virtualized servers sitting on cement. What was once called a data center is now being called the company cloud. But don’t be fooled.

To reap the benefits organizations thought they were going to get with their investment requires much more than just equipment. Virtualizing servers is just one of many key actions required to receive all the advantages of cloud.

Public clouds by Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce have set high expectations that private clouds are just as dynamic and automated, and that they provide a high level of self-service capabilities. Done right, private cloud can increase an organization’s agility and speed to innovation while reducing costs through better asset utilization—some of the key reasons why organizations move to the cloud in the first place.

Click below for more.

via The Fallacy Of Private Cloud: Are You Getting What You Paid For?.

IBM, Cloudera, Amazon announcements: Big Data news roundup | ZDNet

In the past couple weeks, several news items in the Big Data world have cropped up. Enough of them, in fact, to warrant a round-up and analysis.

IBM DashDB enhanced

I’ve written previously about cloud-based elastic data warehouse (DW) services from Amazon Web Services (Redshift), Microsoft (Azure SQL Data Warehouse) and Snowflake. But IBM has a DW service as well, called DashDB, to which a couple of important enhancements were announced recently.

For example, the service can now accommodate data warehouses up to 20TB (and IBM tells me that’s a conservative number), whereas, before, even the highest service tier maxed out at 12TB. In addition, the product now offers compatibility with Oracle’s PL/SQL dialect of the Structured Query Language (which is what SQL stands for — if you didn’t know). Together, these changes are clearly aimed at getting Oracle DW customers with wandering eyes to move to IBM’s cloud.

DashDB is primarily based on IBM’s veteran relational database technology, DB2. It also borrows in-database analytics technology from Netezza (IBM’s Massively Parallel Processing DW platform). Now, combine that lineage and diversity with the fact that DashDB sits in the same part of IBM created from its acquisition of NoSQL database firm Cloudant in 2014 and IBM’s announcement last week (covered by my ZDNet colleague Rachel King) that it has acquired Compose (formerly MongoHQ), a company which supports Database-as-a-Service offerings for NoSQL databases MongoDB, Redis and RethinkDB; relational database PostgreSQL; and search technology from ElasticSearch, and IBM becomes a company worth watching in the world of cloud database technology and service offerings.

Click below for more.

via IBM, Cloudera, Amazon announcements: Big Data news roundup | ZDNet.

Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite Could Be a $1 Billion Business — Redmondmag.com

One year after releasing its Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), Microsoft says it’s the “hottest” product the company now offers. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner last week said EMS is on pace to become the company’s next $1 billion product (in annual revenue).

While Turner didn’t indicate when that might happen, the company yesterday in its earnings release said it has 17,000 Enterprise Mobility customers, up 90 percent for its fourth fiscal quarter ended June 30, year-over-year. The overall installed base has increased 600 percent, the company said, though naturally from a small base. EMS is a cloud-based service consisting of Intune, Azure Active Directory and Azure Rights Management. Subscriptions start as low as $4 per month per user.

“It is the hottest product we have in the company,” Turner said in his keynote address at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando, Fla. “This product has exploded. It will be a $1 billion product in the future and the market is being made on it now.”

At the same time, many competitors with mobile device management suites and various security tools are fighting back. The latest to do so is VMware, which last month enhanced its AirWatch suite by adding its own single sign-on offering that could compete with Azure Active Directory. Adding insult to injury, VMware was named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise mobility management along with Citrix, IBM and Good Technology, while Microsoft was a Visionary for having “a strong vision but falling short of the leaders in terms of execution.” Likewise Okta was showcased as the only leader in the Identity Access and Management as a Service category with Azure AD, showing as a Visionary. When I spoke with Microsoft at the time about that, the company spun it as a good thing that Microsoft was recognized as a visionary for a product that wasn’t in the market for even a year.

Click below for more.

via Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite Could Be a $1 Billion Business — Redmondmag.com.

Microsoft banks on Enterprise Mobility Suite – Business Insider

No matter what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company’s new mission is — to vaguely empower people “to achieve more” — he’s focused on one thing: owning cloud computing.

Not only is Microsoft competing head-to-head with market leader Amazon to encourage programmers and corporations to run their apps on Microsoft’s cloud service, it is also rolling out all kinds of its own apps on its own cloud and selling those. This is beyond Office 365 (its cloud version of Microsoft Office) and Microsoft Dynamics (its cloud sales app, that competes with Salesforce).

One of those cloud services is called Enterprise Mobility Suite, and on Wednesday, speaking at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando, Florida, COO Kevin Turner told the company’s thousands of of resellers that he thinks this product will become a billion-dollar business in the future, reports CRN. He wants them to be selling it now, and adding their own apps, services on top of it.

Enterprise Mobility Suite is a combination of three of Microsoft’s cloud services:

• Azure Active Directory Premium, which manages passwords for employees for Windows and for thousands of other cloud apps, and can help a company detect if its being attacked
• Microsoft Intune, which manages and protects the mobile devices themselves, from Windows PCs and laptops to Android/iOS/Windows smartphones
• Azure Rights Management, which can password protect the data itself so sensitive documents can’t be seen by unauthorized people.

Click below for more.

via Microsoft banks on Enterprise Mobility Suite – Business Insider.

Cortana Becomes Microsoft’s Portal for Big Data Analytics

Perhaps the chief complaint businesses have about big data solutions, now that Hadoop is already 12 years old, is that applications are not doing their part to make all that data actionable — it doesn’t give people something to do with it.

That complaint was heard loud and clear last May, when Gartner analysts Merv Adrian and Nick Heudecker released a report on Hadoop adoption. In their survey, only 18 per cent of Gartner’s Research Circle members said that they would be investing in Hadoop over the next two years.

Two years ago, that might have been good news for Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, the leaders in conventional relational databases.

But now that they’ve gone “all-in,” the market may be turning south, and Microsoft finds itself saving what it might have earlier tried fervently to sink.

“Mini-Apps”

Yesterday, Microsoft demonstrated something it calls GigJam (let’s hope the name doesn’t stick around in the final release) to a packed audience of company partners at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando.

It’s a service that associates data from multiple sources on-demand, using some of the analytics technology it had developed for Power BI to make everyday data queriable by voice and accessible through touch.

via Cortana Becomes Microsoft’s Portal for Big Data Analytics.

Microsoft Seeks a Comeback – But Is It Too Late? – US News

Satya Nadella’s brief tenure as head of Microsoft has been marked by an increasingly urgent struggle to win back the attention of consumers wooed for the last decade by innovations from Google and Apple. But even the launch this month of a Windows update that could arguably be the tech giant’s most important product in a decade may not be enough to spark new momentum from its legacy users.

The once-dominant tech firm sent a powerful message about its future on Monday with deals that shed payroll and sold off peripheral services. It cut its losses in digital advertising, selling its operations to AOL after failing to see a return on billions of dollars of investments in the last decade, while online car-service Uber acquired the division behind the mapping capabilities of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

 

Both moves were clear evidence of the company’s decision to re-emphasize its core products – none more important to it than the Windows operating system that put its co-founder Bill Gates and the Redmond, Washington, firm on the map in the 1990s. Nadella is looking ahead to July 29 when the company will launch Windows 10 as an update that will link Microsoft’s PC, tablet, mobile and gaming platforms, interconnecting and elevating the products in a manner the company hopes will make it competitive with the rivals that have overshadowed it.

Nadella has very publicly steered Microsoft toward a “mobile-first, cloud-first” goal since last February, when he was promoted to CEO after 22 years at the company. Since then, he has worked to move Microsoft beyond what critics say were the failures of former CEO Steve Ballmer to recognize and take advantage of the rise of mobile and cloud technologies that Apple and Google began to dominate in the early 2000s. Aside from its Xbox game system, Microsoft did not generate much excitement from consumers during those years and its products underperformed even as the iPod and the iPhone propelled Apple into the world’s most valuable company, now worth more than $700 billion.

Click below for more.

via Microsoft Seeks a Comeback – But Is It Too Late? – US News.

Microsoft expands Azure big data choices with MapR and Hortonworks – IT News from V3.co.uk

Microsoft is expanding the options for customers of its Azure cloud platform to operate big data projects in the cloud with the addition of new Hadoop offerings from MapR Technologies and Hortonworks in addition to its own big data services.

MapR and Hortonworks both offer enterprise-grade analytics packages based on the open source Apache Hadoop platform. Microsoft will offer the MapR Distribution and the recently released Hortonworks Data Platform 2.3 on Azure from this summer.

T K Rengarajan, corporate vice president for the data platform in Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division, said on Microsoft’s SQL Server blog that the moves are part of the firm’s commitment to making Azure the best cloud platform for hyper-scale big data projects.

“This includes an existing Hadoop-as-a-service solution, Azure HDInsight, a hyper-scale repository for big data, Azure Data Lake, and Hadoop infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Hortonworks and Cloudera,” Rengarajan said.

The MapR Distribution, which has just hit version 5.0, includes Hadoop plus MapR-FS, an HDFS and POSIX compliant file store; MapR-DB, a NoSQL data store; and the MapR Control System management tool.

When MapR is available in the Azure Marketplace, customers will be able to launch a full Hadoop cluster based on MapR as an Azure Virtual Machine with a few clicks, Microsoft said.

Meanwhile, The MapR Distribution will also be integrated with the Azure Data Lake, enabling users to deploy tiered analytical and storage capabilities, while MapR will fully support deployment of MapR-DB on Azure.

The Hortonworks Data Platform has already been available on Azure, but the new 2.3 release is claimed to offer a greatly improved user experience along with increased enterprise readiness across security, governance and operations.

The enhanced user interface comes courtesy of Hortonworks’ integration of the Apache Ambari project, which has been developed to support easier provisioning, management and monitoring of Hadoop clusters.

HDP 2.3 also introduces customisable dashboards for some of the most frequently used components, plus Smart Configuration for HDFS, YARN, HBase and Hive, and other improvements to make it easier to manage a Hadoop deployment.

“HDP 2.3 brings an entirely new user experience for Apache Falcon, our data lifecycle management component,” said Hortonworks product manager Rohit Bakhshi.

“The new Falcon UI allows you to search and browse processes that have executed, visualise lineage and set up mirroring jobs to replicate files between clusters and cloud storage, allowing enterprises to seamlessly back up data to Azure Blob Storage.”

HDP 2.3 will be supported for deployment on Azure virtual machine instances from this summer, and will simultaneously be available on Windows Server and Linux, according to Hortonworks.

via Microsoft expands Azure big data choices with MapR and Hortonworks – IT News from V3.co.uk.

Exponential business: 5 steps to a data-centric organization – Microsoft for Work

Businesses finding the most success these days are the ones embracing the technology that’s available to collect data and visualize it in the simplest way possible. The exponential business is one that is taking advantage of accelerating technologies, including data visualization, to outpace their peers. And the best part is you don’t need an army of data scientists to become an exponential business—and see a huge impact on your bottom line.

Here’s how to take your business from novice data users to expert data wranglers—with or without resident data scientists.

Click below for more.

via Exponential business: 5 steps to a data-centric organization – Microsoft for Work.

The IT pro: master of the technology universe – Microsoft for Work

Here is some humor.

Heroes. Champions. The oft-unseen glue that keeps our companies running. Meet the IT professional.

via The IT pro: master of the technology universe – Microsoft for Work.

Amazon AWS vs Google Cloud Platform vs Microsoft Azure: Which Public Cloud Is Best for You?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the titan of public cloud services, but Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are getting more competitive every day. According to Goldman Sach, spendings on Cloud Computing will grow at a 30% CAGR between 2013 and 2018 compared with 5% growth of overall enterprise IT. By 2018, 59% of total cloud workloads will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), up from 41% in 2013. 28% cloud workloads would be Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and 13% will be Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS). Let’s do a service-by-service comparison to determine which public cloud is right for your business.

Let’s do a service-by-service comparison to determine which public cloud is right for your business.

Click below for more.

via Amazon AWS vs Google Cloud Platform vs Microsoft Azure: Which Public Cloud Is Best for You? – Dazeinfo.

With Amazon Atop the Cloud, Big Tech Rivals Are Giving Chase – NYTimes.com

Amazon unveiled the financial performance of its powerful growth engine for the first time on Thursday, and the numbers sure looked pretty — especially compared with big companies like Microsoft and Google that are chasing it.

While Amazon is primarily known as an online retailer, its revenue and its stock market returns for years have been energized by an entirely different kind of commerce: renting processing power to start-ups and, increasingly, established businesses.

Click below for more.

via With Amazon Atop the Cloud, Big Tech Rivals Are Giving Chase – NYTimes.com.