Microsoft launches Cloud for Retail in latest industry cloud targeting

Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft Cloud for Retail, in another sign of the largest cloud providers targeting specific industries and sectors.

The announcement, which was made at NRF 2021, the annual retail jamboree, aims to help brands enable what Microsoft calls 'intelligent retail'.

As Shelley Bransten, corporate vice president for worldwide retail and consumer goods at Microsoft noted, this involves "using digital solutions to help better know customers,...

14 January 2021 | Applications

AWS secures MGM and BMW customer wins as supply chain use cases reign supreme

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has essentially cornered the market in cloud for three-letter abbreviations - SLA (service level agreement) and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) aside - so it's perhaps fitting that the company's latest tranche of recruits involve two of the world's most recognisible three-letter abbreviated brands.

Continuing the steady stream of news following re:Invent's kick-off last week, AWS announced it had secured partnerships with Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) and the BMW...

8 December 2020 | AWS

IATA utilises Rackspace Technology as airlines look to the clouds to modernise post-Covid

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is working with Rackspace Technology to utilise Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies as well as DevOps best practices for its members.

A review of the IATA's stack saw 'legacy applications [that] were hindering [its] digital transformation', but noting that by using containers and serverless technologies from AWS could 'achieve its goal to becoming leaner, greener, and use meaningful data.'

Alongside this, the...

1 December 2020 | AWS

From capex to opex: Ensuring the cloud shift optimises costs

The pandemic has thrown many organisations’ three- or five-year IT planning cycles into disarray. The sudden need to switch entire office-based workforces to remote working means that many organisations have had to invest heavily in software and infrastructure as a service to ensure they can keep operating. At the same time, many have faced reduced income as the economy contracts. As a result, switching to a predictable opex-based strategy seems highly attractive.

However,...

3 November 2020 | Economy

Google Cloud hits $3.44bn in latest revenues – as more detail is promised for future quarters

Google Cloud has posted $3.44 billion (£2.62bn) in its third quarter revenues at a growth of 44% year over year - but future earnings releases will see more detail as the company looks to convince investors and prospects of its progress.

Total revenues for Alphabet were $46.17bn for the most recent quarter, up 14% from this time last year, with Google Cloud comprising 7.5% of all revenue generated. Google Cloud revenues were up 14% on the previous quarter, having broken the $3bn...

30 October 2020 | Economy

Microsoft sees strong growth in latest financials – as analyst puts Azure bigger than Windows for first time

Microsoft has reported revenues of $37.2 billion (£28.8bn) for its most recent quarter with Azure revenue growth at 48% - as one analyst argued Azure has overtaken Windows numbers for the first time.

The nuts and bolts of the earnings release did not differ from the norm. The headline for the earnings release, 'Microsoft Cloud Strength Fuels First Quarter Results', conforms to the usual template which this publication noted this time last year: 'Microsoft Cloud [noun] [verb]...

28 October 2020 | Economy

Head in the cloud: Why media production teams are adopting cloud-based solutions for a post-Covid world

Sponsored “Change is inevitable … growth is optional,” says John C Maxwell, internationally recognised leadership expert and best-selling author.

As a renowned leadership guru, Maxwell may have been talking in general terms, but for media organisations in these tumultuous times, change has come along like an unstoppable tidal wave, with solutions to the challenge of remote working needing to be found. The question is – sink or swim?

So, how do traditional media...

26 October 2020 | AWS

20,000 petabytes under the sea: Exploring the potential of underwater data centres

Humans have become very good at polluting vast areas of the planet by dumping waste in the sea, so perhaps it’s about time that something we put in the sea has the potential improve pollution rather than just adding to it?

Mid-September saw the completion of Microsoft’s first ever experiment with underwater data centres off the Orkney Isles, and the reports have made for intriguing reading. The formal results have yet to be released, but initial signs suggest that the deep sea...

19 October 2020 | Data Centres

Why the future of cloud infrastructure is all about the interconnection fabric

The future of cloud infrastructure means the traditional wide area network (WAN) needs to be architected and engineered differently to become a dynamic, automated, interconnection fabric between globally distributed data centre in the core and at the edge.

With the arrival of 5G networks and Industry 4.0, distributed cloud architectures are in the spotlight. Time-sensitive applications, such as industrial automation and autonomous vehicles, will use artificial intelligence (AI)...

3 July 2020 | Architecture

Microsoft launches healthcare cloud, says more industry clouds will follow

Microsoft has launched its first industry-specific cloud offering aimed at healthcare, with the promise of more industry clouds to follow.

The announcement was made as part of the now-virtual Microsoft Build event. While the major headlines of the developer jamboree have focused around big investments in artificial intelligence, as sister publication AI News has reported, Azure has often featured peripherally underpinning the projects. The partnership with OpenAI - to whom...

20 May 2020 | Collaboration