Amazon Web Services Added 516 Major New Features and Services in 2014; on Pace to Beat in 2015

Amazon Web Services launched 516 major new features and services in 2014, said Amazon Web Services Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels.

Nobody would be surprised if Amazon adds even more features and services than that in 2015, extending a lead it holds in public cloud computing.

A RightScale survey of cloud computing professionals found 30 percent of respondents using only public cloud, while five percent use only private cloud. Some 58 percent use a hybrid approach.

source: RightScale

The RightScale survey also found 57 percent run applications on AWS, up from 54 percent a year earlier.

Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform and infrastructure posted a combined score 19 percent.

Google’s App Engine was used by eight percent of survey respondents. An additional five percent use Google’s infrastructure products.

source: Geekwire

Microsoft is seeing significantly better traction in large enterprises. About 19 percent of enterprise users aid that they used Azure’s infrastructure products.

Some 15 percent of enterprise cloud users said that they used Azure’s platform as a service products. 50 percent of enterprise users say that they have applications running on AWS, up from 49 percent in 2014.

Smaller businesses tend to prefer AWS, though. Fully 61 percent of respondents who work at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees said that they have applications running on AWS, compared to nine percent who have workloads running on Azure’s “infrastructure as a service” products.

Long term, that might benefit AWS as startups grow bigger and continue to use AWS.

It might be easy enough to argue that Amazon innovates rapidly to maintain its lead. It might be equally fair to say that Amazon innovates fast because that is among the fundamental requirements of modern computing.

Amazon identifies, and says it responds to, six key trends in computing.

Major Computing Trends, Amazon Response
move quickly	spin up, spin down services
focus on core competence	provide infrastructure
rent rather than own servers	event-driven services
security	multiple certifications
mobile support	host back end services
make data work	machine learning

source: PC magazine

source: Business Insider

China Android Users Switching to iPhone?

A significant percentage of China’s Android users are switching to Apple iPhones, a survey by Asian investment banking firm CLSA has found.

The survey of 854 middle-class consumers in China, including 594 in tier one or tier two cities and 260 in smaller cities found that 53 percent of survey respondents who own an iPhone switched from Android.

On the other hand, only four percent of Android phone owners in the survey switched from the iPhone to Android.

The average age of these respondents was 35.  

Some 32 percent of Android users surveyed who plan to buy a new phone in the next 12 months indicate they will switch to the iPhone.

Also, some 54 percent of all survey respondents who plan to buy a new phone in the next 12 months will choose the iPhone. Samsung, however, ranks a close second as the device respondents believe they will buy next.

Of all the people CLSA surveyed, only 36 percent currently own an iPhone.

CSLR' CRR Apple China Survey

FANTASTIC-5G Air Interface Group Launched with 8 Million Euros in EC Funding

You just can’t keep up with all the new entities developing standards for fifth generation mobile networks.

A group of 16 firms are collaborating on a new air interface below 6 GHz for 5G networks.

The “FANTASTIC-5G” (Flexible Air iNTerfAce for Scalable service delivery wiThin wIreless Communication networks of the 5th Generation) project will focus on capacity, flexibility and energy efficiency of the next generation of mobile networks.

Future mobile networks need to become even more flexible and efficient than 4G, 3G and 2G networks, proponents argue.

The group aims to create a new multi-service air interface that operates below 6 GHz frequency for 5G networks, and is:

·       Highly flexible, to support different types of data traffic.

·       Scalable, to support an ever-growing number of networked devices.

·       Versatile, to support diverse device types and traffic/transmission characteristics.

·       Energy- and resource-efficient, to better use the available spectrum.

·       Future-proofed, enabling easy upgrades to future software releases.

FANTASTIC-5G is funded by eight million Euros provided by the European Commission under the EU´s “Horizon 2020” initiative aiming to advance digital Europe.

The members of FANTASTIC-5G include service providers (Orange, Telecom Italia), component and infrastructure vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Sequans Communications, Wings ICT Solutions), universities (Aalborg University, Politecnico di Bari, Institut Mines-Telecom/Telecom Bretagne, University of Bremen) and research institutes (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives - Laboratoire d’électronique et de technologie de l’information (CEA-Leti), Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institut (HHI)) from Europe.

If You Have to Jump a Big Ditch, Best to do so in a Single Leap

One good rule, when any firm is searching for revenue growth in new markets, is to pick a potentially big market, rather than a small one, and to choose a fast-growing market, not a slow-growing market.

In that regard, it is hard to fault the logic of focusing growth initiatives in enterprise areas such as cloud computing.

Cloud computing revenues are growing at rates between 20 percent and 40 percent, including security at perhaps 46 percent, analytics at 38 percent, storage at 36 percent.

Pyramid Research expects enterprise cloud service revenue in Latin America to expand from US$6.5 billion in 2014 to US$21.5 billion in 2019, growing ten times faster than telecommunication services, for example.  

     

Together, Brazil and Mexico accounted for 58 percent of the total enterprise cloud services revenue in LATAM in 2014, followed by the combined revenue of Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru at 24 percent.

That does not mean cloud is irrelevant for micro-businesses and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which make up 99 percent of all businesses in Latin America.

Those segments might drive as much as 54 percent of overall enterprise cloud services revenue by the end of 2019.

Cloud services are about apps and content more than “voice,” services aimed at PCs, tablets or smartphones than “phones.”

Microsoft Writes Off Nokia Acquisition

Nothing is more perilous than making a prediction about the future. Consider this forecast of mobile device operating system market share, made in 2011.

By now, four years later, Windows Phone was supposed to have caught or surpassed Android.

Instead, in January 2015 Windows Phone had 2.26 percent of the installed base globally.

Android was still number one with a share of 59.78 percent.

And now Microsoft has announced the reduction of up to 7,800 positions, primarily in the phone business.

Microsoft also will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia Devices and Services (NDS) business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.

In other words, Microsoft is completely writing off its acquisition of the Nokia

devices business.

Precisely how Microsoft views mobile devices is open to some interpretation. But one view is that Microsoft will henceforth not be a major contestant either in devices or mobile operating systems.

source: Global Nerdy

IP Communications Suppliers Need to Bundle Additional Value: Customers Want It

Creating new lines of business to replace lost legacy revenues is a key problem for all communications service providers. The good news is that the small and medium business market seems to welcome “one stop shop” suppliers rather than doing all the extra work a “best of breed” approach requires.

That has clear implications for providers of communication services to SMBs. “If you can get the offer right, you’ll win business,” said John Macario, Edgewater Networks VP.

That likely means bundling the most-wanted features, with simple and fair pricing, and being a service provider the customer trusts to provide support.

You might argue those are no-brainer issues, but the tough adoption curve over the past 15 years or so suggests suppliers haven’t gotten everything right, so far.

And, to be fair, it isn’t clear the value proposition has been so clear, either.

The key point is that the market opportunities in the SMB IP communications business are not limited to unified communications or IP voice.

Even in the most-difficult scenarios--small organizations with four or fewer employees--no less than 20 percent of respondents are willing to purchase additional managed services from their “telecom” provider.

In the more-than-20 employee market segments 40 percent to 47 percent of respondents are willing to buy additional managed services from their telecom providers.

And there is strong preference in all segments to buy from a single vendor, whenever possible, instead of using a “best in breed” approach.

That means service providers should look for logical additional managed services to provide. Storage and backup seems clearly the next service with the highest demand.

Paradoxically, Low Adoption Means High Opportunity

Paradoxically, even if small and medium business adoption of hosted IP communications is relatively low, considering the amount of time such services have been sold, potential therefore is quite large.

In other words, most of the potential buyers remain to be gotten.

Although IP adoption rates have increased over the last decade, the new survey sponsored by Edgewater Networks and Metaswitch Networks clearly shows that a large percentage of the small and medium business (SMB) market in the United States, “perhaps more than expected,” still uses TDM systems and services.

While adoption rates are higher in larger organizations, as high as 36 percent for organizations with 500 or more employees, adoption for smaller SMBs (less than 100 employees) is less than 25 percent.

Put another way, 66 percent of the medium-sized organization IP communications business is yet to be gained, while 75 percent of the small business opportunity likewise remains outstanding.

The low adoption rates mean that the market for IP services is “extremely large, the study reports. “We estimate that the U.S. market alone is worth over $26 billion annually,” said John Macario, Edgewater Networks VP.

That is a larger forecast than many have offered, but is based on simple extrapolation from a number of other data points, including U.S. Census Bureau data on the number of U.S. businesses in various categories, the number of employees and some basic assumptions about lines needed per employee.

That generates an estimate of potential seats for hosted IP communications, and based on recurring revenue, the potential market size, and

Perhaps the greatest sensitivity in that model is the assumption that each employee requires an account, and that the market potential is defined by the number of employees still using legacy phone services and systems.

Both assumptions build on the notion that every employee requires unified communications. You might note that those are very different assumptions from past legacy system principles, which generally assumed that the key input was the ratio of trunk lines to people or “numbers.”

Requirements arguably are quite different when messaging is a core requirement and expectation. It might be quite rational to expect that every employee requires email and messaging tools, irrespective of the number of circuits or trunks required to support “voice.”

In other words, what we used to call the concentration ratio, or trunk lines required based on the number of employees, assuming some sharing, is an inaccurate way to describe demand for messaging and unified communications.

In fact, as we see in the case of mobile communications, messaging is the preferred medium, voice a secondary medium. So old rules about concentration ratios (trunk lines to support multiple users) do not hold.

That is to say nothing of the physical reality that IP communications does not build on “trunks” or “circuits.”

It can be argued that the mobile revolution, and advent of messaging, is driving much of the interest in unified communications. Firms that have adopted unified communications report using mobile and desktop clients that unify access to voice and instant messaging apps; transfer calls between mobiles and desk phones and provide a single voicemail.

IP and TDM users both place a high degree of value on unified communications and mobility features and are requiring them when looking to upgrade from their current environment.

Across the SMB market, decision makers said that having an offer with the right economics from a service provider they trust are the key purchase drivers.

The point is that the reputation of the supplier really does matter, and that especially is true for small businesses. Medium-sized organizations tend to care more about product attributes, says Macario.

Also important are access to phone system features from mobile devices.

The study was conducted In March 2015 of decision makers from 1,250 SMB entities.