Amazon Digs at Oracle and Microsoft
AWS CEO, Andy Jassy snubbed other providers offering traditional on-premises database services at the company’s 10th annual public sector conference in Washington D.C. last Wednesday. Jassy stated, “I think most people are pretty frustrated with the older database solutions. They’re expensive, proprietary, high lock-in.” Jassy finishes by saying, “It’s just a model that people are sick of. And it’s why people are moving as quickly as possible to more open engines.” Microsoft and Oracle have yet to respond
Jassy’s comments come shortly after our reporting that Microsoft and Oracle announced they were teaming up to create a high-speed link between their data centers to unite against AWS, and a little over a month out from the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract winner announcement. Amazon and Microsoft are the two remaining companies in contention for the contract.
The partnership between Microsoft and Oracle gives the ability to deploy apps and databases across both clouds with unified identity and billing support, but also may provide a loophole for the JEDI contract’s single-source requirement in a creative way. The Oracle Ashburn region and Azure US East region appear to cover the Washington DC area, which Principal Analyst Paul Teich says is no coincidence.
Google Cloud Integrates ChainLink
Google Cloud has unveiled that it is integrating ChainLink into its Big Query data warehouse. Allen Day, a developer advocate at Google Cloud, discussed the integration in a blog post on the company’s site. In the post, he discusses the possibility of developing hybrid blockchain-cloud apps, using Ethereum smart contracts technology and its native cloud service Big-Query.
Google presents three different technical implementations of the solutions they are providing: Prediction marketplace, hedging against blockchain platform risk, and improving transaction privacy on Ethereum through late placements using oracles. Google claims that customers will trade a small amount of latency and transaction overhead for a potentially large amount of economic utility.
Google believes the use of ChainLink services can help “reduce the manifestations of inefficiency” and in some cases “add completely new features to Ethereum smart contracts.” ChainLink’s association with Google also looks to be good news for the cost of Link tokens, with the price jumping by over 70% to an all time high of $1.94, making its market cap touch $680 million.
Salesforce Buys Tableau
Just a little over a week after Google announced that it is buying data analytics company Looker, Salesforce has announced that they are planning to buy Tableau, an interactive visualization software company, for $15.7 billion. A company whose 86,000 business customers include Verizon, Netflix, and Southwest Airlines.
The $15.7 billion figure is the enterprise value of the transaction based on the average price of Salesforce shares as of a week ago. Since Tableau is a publicly traded company, the deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock getting exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock.
The deal has already been approved by the boards of both companies and is a major win for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and dive deeper into analytics. Post-acquisition, Tableau will continue to operate independently and will remain headquartered in Seattle headed by its CEO Adam Selipsky. Moves like this one shows how much analytics are starting to matter in the cloud.
IBM Introduces Its Virtual Hybrid Cloud
IBM Cloud is joining the rest of the major cloud providers with the arrival of their Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC, offering. VPC allows customers to deploy desired cloud resources by defining and controlling a virtual network in logically isolated parts of the IBM cloud.
This maneuver shows that IBM Cloud is maturing and attempting to stack up with other major cloud providers.
That’s a wrap for this week’s Liftr Cloud Look Ahead. Has your business made interesting strides using cloud? We want to hear from you! Email us at ideas@liftrcloud.com.
See you next week!
