Cloud News Roundup: AWS Earnings on Deck, Microsoft Under Scrutiny
Plus, SAP and Snow both have partner program updates. And Hitachi Vantara and MSP Lemongrass share news.
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Industry observers have been lamenting a so-called slowdown in cloud computing spending since the pandemic abated, but that’s not really a fair claim.
Sure, the hyperscalers have seen slight drops in quarterly revenue but AWS and Azure, for their part, continue to report more than $20 billion in sales every three months (Google Cloud still shows the smallest revenue numbers, keeping it in third place worldwide). That is far from shabby. At AWS, in particular, cloud computing is driving the company’s success while retail and other groups experience some lags.
Over at SeekingAlpha, writer Business Quant, with almost 25,000 followers, predicts that will remain the case next week when Amazon reports its second-quarter financials. Business Quant forecasts that, company-wide, Amazon will show $126.4 billion in revenue. Wall Street’s estimates are considerably lower, stretching from about $115 billion to a little more than $120 billion.
“This variance leads me to believe that the Street is underestimating Amazon’s prospects and that the company is poised to beat analyst estimates in its upcoming Q2 earnings report,” Business Quant writes.
Of interest is that Zacks Equity Research is calling for $131.5 billion in revenue, which would mark an 8.5% increase over the year-ago quarter. The firm did not speculate how much of that figure AWS might be responsible for delivering.
It’s a wait-and-see game. Amazon will report its latest earnings on Aug. 3 after the market closes.
Microsoft has once again come under scrutiny for anticompetitive practices.
The European Commission, Europe’s antitrust regulator, said on July 27 it has opened a formal investigation into Microsoft (which just reported strong earnings stemming largely from its cloud and generative AI services). The agency wants to understand whether Microsoft broke any laws by tying Teams to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 for businesses.
Authorities say they are concerned that Microsoft gets an inherent advantage by not allowing customers the choice of whether to include Teams in their productivity-suite subscriptions. Teams competitor Slack, owned by Salesforce, initiated the complaint back in 2020 when the world was under lockdown and people worked from home in droves. Like other cloud providers, Microsoft thrived during that time because of demand for anywhere-anytime capabilities such as those provisioned by Teams and Office/Microsoft 365.
On the next slide, we examine more of the issues around the complaint and what the European Commission and Microsoft both have to say.
Even post-pandemic, the European Commission considers Microsoft’s Teams requirement within Office/Microsoft 365 as a potential competitive breach.
“Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe,” Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of competition policy, said in a prepared statement. “We must therefore ensure that the markets for these products remain competitive, and companies are free to choose the products that best meet their needs.”
The European Commission said there’s no legal deadline for ending its antitrust investigation. It has informed Microsoft of its activities. Antitrust authorities also said that launching a probe does not prejudge the outcome.
Germany-based video conferencing vendor Alfaview last week also lodged a complaint against Microsoft over forcing customers to use Teams. Alfaview said Microsoft accordingly gets unfair competitive advantage over its rivals.
In a statement, Microsoft said it respects the European Commission’s work on the case and will cooperate with the agency to find solutions “that will address its concerns.”
Software asset management provider Snow just unveiled its new partner program.
“Our teams at Snow have put a lot of work, research, feedback and heart into this new program,” wrote Vin Chumber, worldwide vice president of ecosystems and digital sales in a July 27 blog. “The program was developed to ensure partners had a modern, merit-based system that would fuel further growth of their businesses as their relationships with Snow deepen.”
The initiative applies to Snow Atlas. That’s the company’s platform that brings together disparate components of the IT environment — cloud, software and SaaS — into one place. That way, experts get visibility, management capabilities and decision-making insight across different services and assets without having to dig through different portals for information.
Snow targets channel partners including resellers, managed service providers, global systems integrators and independent software vendors.
“They are an essential line to the needs of customers and the market, helping influence our product roadmap and strategy,” Chumber said. “As such, they are a true extension of our team.”
With that in mind, Snow has made some significant changes to its channel efforts. Go to the next slide.
The Snow Partner Program now features new discounts, training, certifications and sales-shadowing, Chumber said. There’s also a new focus on incentives. While this form of compensation “can be incredibly motivating,” it doesn’t always keep customer success as the ultimate goal, he noted.
“We want to change this by introducing a new rewards program which recognizes individuals within partner organizations, providing points not just for connecting Snow with new customers but for advancing a positive customer experience, building market awareness, completing certifications and more.”
At the same time, Snow wants to increase its communication with partners. So, the vendor is giving every partner “real-time information on where they stand in the program, beginning with new Partner Scorecards. Our commitment to transparency will also include new systems to engage in two-way dialogue, so partners know what to expect from Snow and can discover new opportunities to strengthen their business.”
Next, Snow now will provide its training and certification site, Snow Academy, for free to all partners. It further has created new pre-sales and sales content to help partners during those processes.
Finally, the company has beefed up its partner portal, SnowHow, as well — a typical move when a vendor debuts channel program upgrades.
All of this, Chumber wrote, “offers a level playing field for all partners, providing further support and opportunities to ensure value is delivered to joint customers.”
Managing multiple hybrid clouds remains one of the IT world’s greatest challenges.
Hitachi Vantara and Microsoft Azure hope to start resolving the problem, and the channel — through which both providers sell — will play a role in helping.
This week, the companies debuted Hitachi Unified Compute Platform for Azure Stack HCI. The software supports management across cloud environments including data centers, branch offices and edge computing. It uses Azure cloud services alongside Hitachi’s cloud infrastructure and comes with automation, analytics and holistic visibility.
“Through our collaboration with Microsoft, and our … engineered systems approach, we help optimize our customers’ cloud architecture to better harness their data, lower operating costs and improve application and user experiences,” said Dan McConnell, senior vice president, product management-storage at Hitachi Vantara.
Hitachi Vantara’s new platform for hybrid cloud management is generally available.
Lemongrass, which specializes in SAP on Cloud, on July 27 released a service to help end users shift any SAP environment into a hyperscaler cloud.
The Atlanta-based MSP said Lemongrass Cloud Platform Migrate supports “complex” environments of more than 150TB, moving those into Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud with “near-zero downtime.”
“SAP downtime often results in significant cost due to lost production, increased labor and potentially even missed sales orders,” said Mike Rosenbloom, CEO of Lemongrass. “With LCP Migrate, we’ve seen technical downtimes in migrations reduced by up to 98% and delivered with a guaranteed downtime window. Users that have 150TB of data that could potentially take them weeks to migrate to a cloud platform can reduce that time to just hours, and with fewer costs.”
Lemongrass is awaiting a patent on its platform. Many organizations that have relied on SAP for enterprise resource planning still are working with legacy, on-premises hardware and software. Moving their SAP environments into the cloud gives them more flexibility and reach.
Speaking of SAP, though, go to the next slide. The longtime corporation has partner news.
As SAP continues its own migration to a cloud-based strategy, the German behemoth has crafted new exclusive partner benefits.
Those include funding for marketing and business development, incentives, and commercial models such as the SAP Business Technology Platform Innovation Fund and Cloud Choice Flex.
“SAP has diligently aspired to possess the right tools, systems, support and partner ecosystem to facilitate the successful shift of even complex ERP environments to the cloud,” the company said in a statement emailed to press this week. “Cloud-based solutions offer the means to future-proof companies` businesses, enabling SAP to deliver continuous innovation while ensuring security, compliance, and scale. Cloud technology is also the gateway to unlock advancements like generative AI.”
As such, SAP plans to keep investing in its cloud ERP portfolio as it encourages on-premises customers to move to the cloud. Partners will be instrumental in that effort, the company said, especially via add-on solutions enabled through BTP and low- and no-code applications.
SAP further is giving partners access to ways to co-innovate and develop with the company. The company also is extending “elevated access” to SAP executives and team members in product engineering and development, regional sales and other areas to “open doors for mutual growth.”
In addition, partners can sell their cloud solutions on SAP Store, SAP’s version of a cloud marketplace.
“By aligning our efforts and offering these benefits, we aim to cultivate a thriving partner ecosystem that drives success for our partners and delivers exceptional value to our joint customers,” SAP said.
As SAP continues its own migration to a cloud-based strategy, the German behemoth has crafted new exclusive partner benefits.
Those include funding for marketing and business development, incentives, and commercial models such as the SAP Business Technology Platform Innovation Fund and Cloud Choice Flex.
“SAP has diligently aspired to possess the right tools, systems, support and partner ecosystem to facilitate the successful shift of even complex ERP environments to the cloud,” the company said in a statement emailed to press this week. “Cloud-based solutions offer the means to future-proof companies` businesses, enabling SAP to deliver continuous innovation while ensuring security, compliance, and scale. Cloud technology is also the gateway to unlock advancements like generative AI.”
As such, SAP plans to keep investing in its cloud ERP portfolio as it encourages on-premises customers to move to the cloud. Partners will be instrumental in that effort, the company said, especially via add-on solutions enabled through BTP and low- and no-code applications.
SAP further is giving partners access to ways to co-innovate and develop with the company. The company also is extending “elevated access” to SAP executives and team members in product engineering and development, regional sales and other areas to “open doors for mutual growth.”
In addition, partners can sell their cloud solutions on SAP Store, SAP’s version of a cloud marketplace.
“By aligning our efforts and offering these benefits, we aim to cultivate a thriving partner ecosystem that drives success for our partners and delivers exceptional value to our joint customers,” SAP said.
AWS earnings will come out a week from today – Aug. 3 – when parent company Amazon releases its second-quarter financials.
As the king of public cloud computing, Amazon Web Services attracts a lot of attention, and that should ramp up next week now that Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud numbers have been released. Our first topic, then, in this week’s cloud news roundup, takes a look at what investors and analysts are expecting from AWS earnings.
Meanwhile, Microsoft faces more scrutiny for possible anti-competitive practices. Find out which of the behemoth provider’s cloud-based products has come under the microscope, and in which part of the world.
Next, Snow, the maker of Snow Atlas, just took the wraps off a brand-new version of its partner program. The company bills the effort as a “level playing field.”
Also notable, Hitachi Vantara this week made a big move with Microsoft Azure. If you deliver multiple hybrid clouds to customers, you’ll want to check out the news.
Then, take a gander at what SAP-only managed service provider Lemongrass is doing to get end users working in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Finally, we end with a look at what SAP itself is doing to elevate – its word – its partners. Here’s a two-word hint: exclusive benefits.
Start with the image above to get this week’s cloud computing scoop, starting with an AWS earnings preview.
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