Read our Senior Analyst Paul Teich’s Forbes articles as he writes about new technologies and usage models transforming business. Paul focuses on what is important, new, different and possibly disruptive about a wide range of technologies. He has been in high-tech for over three decades, including serving as a corporate strategy director for datacenter products at a global technology vendor. Paul speaks to audiences as diverse as product engineers and institutional investors. Paul also received his MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business and has received 12 US patents while working in marketing and strategy roles.
GCP’s drive for OPEX optimization and low-cost leadership is not a strategy to extract value from enterprise accounts. GCP has focused on a small handful of verticals to create enterprise solutions value. The combination is probably not enough to maintain its third-place public cloud revenue position against aggressive competitors. Google Cloud revenue was $2.61B in…
Microsoft has frozen hiring except for strategic services according to recent reports (paywalled link). It is important to note that during Satya Nadella’s six-year reign as Microsoft’s CEO, Microsoft has become a cloud company. While Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud service, Microsoft delivers its core revenue-driving applications as cloud services. Cloud permeates most of Microsoft’s…
Cloud supply chain earnings reports occur in two broad clusters each quarter, this post continues from the first cluster of reports. Key messages are summarized first, with detail for recent earnings reports following. Cloud service provider summary: AWS extended its server depreciation from three to four years, which will potentially change the cadence of new infrastructure…
Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle recently announced quarterly earnings covering their public IaaS cloud offerings, respectively, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). I evaluated each company’s earnings from an IaaS perspective to understand how these cloud giants are managing and growing their infrastructure.…
HPE recently completed its acquisition of Cray, after doing the same with SGI just three years ago. Due to consolidation, top merchant supercomputer vendors (as opposed to government entities building their own) now include server OEMs Dell, HPE and IBM based in North America, Fujitsu in Japan and Atos Bull in Europe. Inspur, Lenovo and…
Well over 90% of cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) instance types are based on Intel Xeon processors. Will AMD EPYC processors take significant cloud market share from Intel, or will some other server processor give both AMD and Intel substantial competition in the cloud? Intel and AMD took over the server processor market in the mid-2000s. This…
Investors are at a disadvantage, because the the cloud industry is opaque. Investors need transparency into the cloud computing supply chain to assess vendor sales claims and mitigate financial risk. But that kind of transparency is hard to achieve with traditional industry analysis tools. How can investors make informed decisions about the cloud service providers…
Many companies want to compete with NVIDIA in the cloud. They all want a chunk of the AI-based “Inference-as-a-Service” applications that NVIDIA has enabled over the past few years. Gaining significant market share against NVIDIA is going to be more difficult than most of them realize. Xilinx seems to be in the best position to capture share of cloud instance…
During Google Cloud Next ’19 (April 9-11, 2019) flurry of announcements, a technical detail with significant business impact surfaced. Google Cloud’s new Anthos hybrid and multi-cloud platform depends on VMware vSphere if an IT shop wants to containerize legacy applications that use local storage. Part of why containers and Kubernetes are so portable and easily deployable is…
IBM spent the past six years building an AI that can hold a structured discussion with a human at an almost human level of achievement. IBM demonstrated its Project Debater AI at its Think event on February 11 in a live on-stage debate with an expert human debater. Project Debater lost the demonstration debate. However,…