La Liga expands Microsoft Azure partnership for OTT services and ML enhancements

La Liga, the foremost Spanish football league, has expanded its partnership with Microsoft Azure to focus on machine learning (ML), over the top (OTT) services, as well as augmented reality.

The two companies promise to 'digitally transform the sports experience globally', and are focusing on improvements for fans, broadcasters and stadia operations alike.

Azure Event Hubs and Azure Data Lake, as well as Azure's machine learning tools, will provide 'data-enhanced match...

20 May 2021 | Applications

AWS launches Amazon FinSpace to muscle in on financial services cloud offerings

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon FinSpace, an industry cloud offering aimed squarely at helping finance organisations efficiently prepare and analyse data.

The purpose-built analytics service 'aggregates, catalogues, and tags data across an organisation's data silos', enabling the data to be easily searchable across the entire company. This is achieved, in part, through a purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine, with more than 100 'data transformations'...

5 May 2021 | AWS

Vodafone extends Google Cloud relationship to build ‘industry-first global data platform’

Vodafone is to use Google Cloud to build a new data platform and migrate its SAP workloads - in an extension of the companies' partnership and another key telecoms use case.

The two companies will jointly build the platform 'with the added capability of processing and moving huge volumes of data globally from multiple systems into the cloud', the press materials noted. Vodafone will host its SAP environment, as well as 'all big data and business intelligence workloads' on Google...

5 May 2021 | Data & Analytics

IBM to acquire Turbonomic with AIOps dominance squarely in its sights

IBM is to acquire Turbonomic, a Boston-based application resource and network performance management software provider, to help organisations with their AIOps initiatives.

The acquisition 'will provide businesses with full stack application observability and management to assure performance and minimise costs using AI to optimise resources - such as containers, VMs, servers, storage, networks, and databases', the company touted in the press materials.

AIOps, the...

30 April 2021 | Applications

AWS pulls in record $13.5bn revenues for Q121 at 32% growth

Another quarter, another record for Amazon Web Services (AWS). The cloud infrastructure leader has reported net sales of $13.50 billion (£9.68bn) for the first quarter at a growth rate of 32% year over year.

The results mean AWS has broken the eleven-figure number for the fifth consecutive quarter. It represents an uptick from the 28% y-o-y growth from the previous quarter, while AWS revenue as a proportion of total Amazon revenue, at 12.5%, is a little below the figure of...

30 April 2021 | AWS

The Walt Disney Company renews vows with AWS for Disney+ global rollout

The Walt Disney Company has reaffirmed its commitment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global rollout of its streaming service, Disney+.

Disney+ is 'expanding its use of AWS… services to include more than 50 technologies, such as machine learning, database, storage, content delivery, serverless, and analytics', in the words of the press materials.

One example is Amazon Kinesis, an AWS service which helps with the real-time collection, processing and analysing of...

29 April 2021 | AWS

Google Cloud hits $4 billion quarterly revenues at 46% yearly growth

Google Cloud broke $4 billion in quarterly revenues at a yearly uptick of 46% - but while losses crept towards the billion dollar mark, things are going in the right direction.

Total revenue for Google Cloud in Q121 was $4.05bn (£2.92bn), compared with $2.78bn for the first quarter of 2020. The company made a loss of $974m in the quarter, compared with $1.73bn this time last year, with this only the second quarter Alphabet broke out full operating income for Google Cloud in its...

28 April 2021 | Earnings

Microsoft posts 50% Azure growth again as ‘strategic’ cloud and industry deals emphasised

Microsoft has posted another quarter of 50% growth in Azure - with overall revenues slightly down on the previous quarter, at $41.7 billion (£30bn).

The company continues to keep specific revenue figures for Azure to itself, but all three of its primary buckets saw solid uptick. Intelligent Cloud, which covers a majority of Azure but not all of it, saw a year-on-year rise of 23% to $15.1bn, while Productivity and Business Processes rose 15% to $13.6bn.

Of the latter,...

28 April 2021 | Earnings

Google Cloud job postings shot up in Q121, says GlobalData – as M&As move into focus

Google Cloud now accounts for almost a third of job postings put out by Alphabet over the past 15 months, according to new figures from GlobalData.

The analyst firm's job analytics platform found Google Cloud's infrastructure and platform capabilities, as well as industry clouds were 'directed to launch new mergers and acquisitions.'

Ajay Thalluri, business fundamentals analyst at GlobalData, said the company was 'looking at many more M&As after it acquired many...

27 April 2021 | Google Cloud

Transforma Insights crowns Microsoft as leading hyperscaler for enterprise digital transformation

A new report has attempted to dive deep into the key capabilities of the three leading hyperscalers - and concluded Microsoft as the overall technical leader.

The report, from analyst firm Transforma Insights, puts the Redmond giant, a clear second in public cloud infrastructure market share, just ahead of market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google 'trails some distance' behind the two leaders.

The assessment comes from Transforma's 'universal rating system' for...

23 April 2021 | Infrastructure