Summary Bullets:

• As the cloud battle in ASEAN continues, AWS has the advantage in the direct connect and go-to-market through partnerships with the domestic providers.

• The provider is also rapidly growing its customer base with various new references.

The public cloud competition in the emerging ASEAN region (excluding Singapore) is heating up. Alibaba Cloud entered the market early by opening a data center in Malaysia in October 2017 followed by another one in Indonesia in March 2018. Seeing the huge potential in the region, Google made an announcement in October 2018 to have its facility in Indonesia ready in early 2020 while AWS responded to its global rival with a similar announcement in April 2019. Despite AWS’ late move in the region (compared to Alibaba Cloud and Google), AWS has the upper hand in the direct connect or edge network as well as in the domestic go-to-market and brand share. This is achieved through its long partnerships with the domestic carriers and SIs. Continue reading “AWS Adds More ASEAN Customers as the Cloud Battle in the Region Heats Up” →

Summary Bullets:

• Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition supports pre-assembled integration with popular business apps.
• The evolving Oracle Cloud provides necessary support for advanced applications, including blockchain.

Oracle has been working to expand its cloud interoperability partnerships, in particular with Microsoft and VMware, building out an ecosystem to further its mission of combining database and PaaS with strengths in management, analytics, and integration. A primary objective of its evolving Oracle Cloud is to help developers build the next-generation of distributed apps, including blockchain apps. Continue reading “Oracle OpenWorld 2019: Oracle’s Evolving Integrated Cloud Paves the Way for Blockchain” →

Summary Bullets:

• HPE has discontinued marketing and development of its IoT platform.

• HPE is instead moving forward in supporting IoT deployments with infrastructure and consulting, working directly with customers as well as third-party SIs and platform providers.

HPE was in Berlin this week as a primary sponsor at Industry of Things World 2019, a hands-on conference focused on industrial IoT and digital transformation for enterprises.

Despite the clear importance of IoT to HPE’s strategy, HPE Universal IoT Platform, which the company had been promoting aggressively for a few years since its launch in 2016, has been discontinued (although it is maintained in a few deployments where it is still being used). HPE found market requirements to be so diverse that attempting to provide a horizontal solution across all sectors and use cases won’t resonate with enough customers to make it worth it. Key industrial verticals – for example automotive manufacturing, which represents a large market opportunity for IIoT – expect a vertical template, and HPE never had much traction with its platform in manufacturing. With its origins in telco OSS/BSS systems, HPE’s solutions have worked well with large scale smart city deployments, although it found adding connectivity to devices challenging. Continue reading “HPE in Industrial IoT – Moving Away from a Catch-All Platform to Collaborative Solutions” →

Summary Bullets:

• VMware and Microsoft Azure are making speedy progress to commercialize their joint hybrid cloud offering, Azure VMware Solutions.

• Azure VMware Solutions forms part of VMware’s push to offer its customers a hybrid cloud option with all of the major cloud providers.

Amid the inundation of announcements and discussions at last week’s VMworld conference in San Francisco, one piece of news that received comparatively less coverage related to Azure VMware Solutions, a hybrid cloud offering from VMware and Microsoft Azure. Already generally available in some U.S. regions, it was revealed at VMworld that by Q1 2020 Azure VMware Solutions would be offered in eight global regions and would include Azure NetApp Files as an option for storage-intensive workloads. Continue reading “VMware Wants to Maximize Hybrid Cloud Choice for Customers but Coopetition will be a Key Challenge” →

Summary Bullets:

• These days, everyone is doing containerization in a mad, industry-wide rush toward what appears to be true cross-cloud compatibility.

• However, enterprise buyers need to be aware that when it comes to containerization and microservices, there’s a huge difference between compatibility and capability.

Back in 1964, media futurist Marshall McLuhan penned the often repeated but somewhat baffling phrase, “the medium is the message,” in an attempt to highlight the importance of the “where and how” of storytelling. To Mr. McLuhan, a film, a novel, and a comic may all tell the exact same story about a boy and his dragon, but importantly each would do so using very different conventions regarding the unfolding of the story, let’s say the manner in which each handles flashbacks. Those differences in turn shape our understanding of the story in unique ways.

Flash forward to the present and among technology providers, particularly those endeavoring to make the architectural leap from premises to cloud, Mr. McLuhan’s more than 55 year old notion seems strangely applicable if not downright prophetic. Let me explain: as a global market trend, the idea of abstraction through containerization technologies like Docker has entirely reshaped the global software landscape, forever altering the way developers create software. In short, abstractions allows developers to write once and run “virtually” anywhere by turning monolithic applications into a series of highly standardized yet extremely malleable microservices. Continue reading “In a Containerized World, Does the Cloud Really Matter Anymore?” →