DUBLIN, January 31, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Healthcare Cloud Computing Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The healthcare cloud computing market was valued at USD 23,749.33 million in 2020, and it is expected to reach USD 52,303.35 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of 14.12% during the forecast period of 2021-2026.

The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have an overall positive effect on the market. There is now an increasing understanding of the potential of cloud technologies, which provide data storage and computing resources that are managed by external service providers to help improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of healthcare. This has become important in the fight against COVID-19.

Due to the huge number of research work and clinical trials being carried out across the world, the research data being generated needs to be stored in a secure environment that can house large amounts of data. Cloud computing solves the problem of both space constraints and security as it allows the hosting of huge amounts of data on private dedicated cloud channels.

A major benefit of cloud-based services to organizations and companies during the COVID-19 pandemic is that they allow faster implementation and upscaling across a range of different settings. They do not require companies to procure additional hardware (such as servers needed for on-premises solutions) and they can be implemented remotely. For example, in March 2020, an AI-enabled auxiliary diagnostic system was offered by Huawei Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Huawei, and artificial intelligence company Huiying Medical Technology Co. Ltd to hospitals in Ecuador remotely.

The major factors that are bolstering the growth of the healthcare cloud computing market include the increasing access to advanced technology, such as machine learning, the rise in adoption of information technology in the healthcare sector, and usage of cloud for reducing cost and improving scalability, storage, and flexibility. Cloud computing involves the use of remote servers that are hosted on the internet to manage, store, and process data.

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A local server is not used in cloud computing, due to which infrastructure costs are reduced significantly. In addition to one-time set-up cost, maintenance cost is also lesser in the case of a cloud-based architecture. The benefits of cloud computing were felt during the COVID-19 pandemic when there was a shortage of healthcare workers, mass lockdowns, and a lack of coordination between healthcare services.

For example, in May 2020, the Oklahoma State Department of Health launched a mobile app that allows healthcare workers to engage remotely with at-risk citizens who may have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus. The app, which was jointly created by Google and MTX Group, uses the Google Cloud to enable the state to quickly contact citizens who report COVID-19 symptoms and send them to testing sites. Agencies were also using cloud-based data dashboards to provide real-time analytics and data visualizations to track and control the spread of the virus.

In the last week of March 2020, the Australian Government's Department of Health launched its Coronavirus Australia App. Built on the Google Cloud, the app can offer real-time information and advice about lockdowns, the spread patterns, and healthcare information pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. These developments are expected to positively affect market growth.

Key Market Trends

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) Segment is Expected to Hold the Largest Market Share During the Forecast Period

The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have a positive impact on the market for EHR. According to an article appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) in November 2020, the development, implementation, and evaluation of EHR-based data sharing networks and platforms and public health information systems are required in the fight against COVID-19.

Since EHR systems can be multi-disciplinary, they can be utilized to collect and analyze data from public health departments, healthcare organizations, and socioeconomic indicators. This can be of immense importance while preparing to roll out programs designed to tackle COVID-19.

According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), EHR refers to an electronic version of patient health information that includes vital signs, patient demographics, progress notes, problems, past medical history, medications, laboratory data, immunizations, and radiology reports. Lack of interoperability prevented the sharing of this data. However, as companies are currently working to develop more patient-friendly interoperable devices, the situation is now changing. Complex healthcare systems require diverse EHR products so that information may be shared seamlessly.

By enabling better workflows and reducing ambiguity, interoperable EHR allows data transfer between EHR systems and healthcare stakeholders much more easily. Thus, due to the factors mentioned above, the market is expected to witness a high growth rate over the forecast period.

North America Accounted for the Largest Share in the Market

North America holds a significant share in the healthcare cloud computing market and is expected to show a similar trend over the forecast period. The United States is a leader in the healthcare cloud computing market, mainly due to the high adoption rate of healthcare IT services and the continuous financial and regulatory support from government agencies. The implementation of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) stimulated the adoption of EHR and supporting technologies across the country.

According to the Act's provisions, healthcare providers would be offered financial incentives for demonstrating meaningful use of EHRs until a certain period of time, after which, time penalties may be levied for failing to explain such use. Cloud-based services are helpful for all stakeholders. Most healthcare institutions neither have the time nor resources to devote attention to cybersecurity that an established cloud provider may have. Moreover, established cloud providers rarely allow the leakage of data. According to a recent HIMSS Analytics Survey in 2018 in the United States, over 83% of healthcare organizations said that they already use cloud services.

The survey also stated that the United States Department of Health and Human Services listed 412 data breaches that were under investigation in 2018. The huge number of data breaches calls for more robust implementation of cloud technology in the healthcare sector to improve security. Thus, owing to all the aforementioned factors, the market is expected to witness high growth over the forecast period.

Competitive Landscape

The healthcare cloud computing market is a moderately consolidated market, owing to the presence of a few key players in the market. The companies are applying powerful competitive strategies to gain more market share. Some of the market players are Amazon Web Services, Dell Inc., IBM Corporation, Oracle Corporation, and Koninklijke Philips NV.

The companies are involved in various strategies such as new product launches and investments in R&D activities to sustain in the highly competitive environment. For example, in November 2020, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare suite to boost patient engagement, health team collaborations, and improve clinical and operational insights.

Companies Mentioned

Key Topics Covered:

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Study Assumptions and Market Definition

1.2 Scope of the Study

2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

4 MARKET DYNAMICS

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Market Drivers

4.2.1 Rise in Adoption of Information Technology in the Healthcare Sector

4.2.2 Access to Advance Technology, Such as Machine Learning, is Easier in Cloud System

4.2.3 Usage of Cloud Reduces Cost and Improves Scalability, Storage, and Flexibility

4.3 Market Restraints

4.3.1 Data Security and Integrity Issues

4.3.2 Lack of Interoperability and Industry Standards

4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5 MARKET SEGMENTATION

5.1 By Application

5.2 By Deployment

5.3 By Service

5.4 By End User

5.4.1 Healthcare Providers

5.4.2 Healthcare Payers

5.5 Geography

6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

6.1 Company Profiles

7 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/jndngd

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220131005627/en/

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The Global Healthcare Cloud Computing Market is Projected to Reach $52,303.35 Million by 2026, at a CAGR of 14.12% - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Yahoo...

PaaS is a cloud computing model where a third-party provider delivers hardware and software tools to users over the internet. As such, PaaS enables developers to develop or run new applications without having to install in-house hardware and software.

PaaS got its start with a service called Zimki, launched out of Canon's Europe-based Fotango in 2005. It removed some of the repetitive tasks from development of JavaScript web apps in a pay-as-you-go model, said Scott Cameron, senior architect at Insight, an IT provider in Temple, Ariz. In 2007, Zimki stopped running because Fotango didn't want to focus on it any longer.

When Google Cloud Platform was introduced in 2008, it launched App Engine, a PaaS system that was originally limited to 10,000 developers, according to Cameron. App Engine let customers run their web apps on Google infrastructure, and it's still around today.

"PaaS offerings began finding wide-scale use a little over a decade ago, shortly after the emergence of infrastructure as a service," said Tim Potter, principal of Deloitte Consulting.

Initial PaaS offerings focused on web application development with a marketplace focus on startups or small firms. Over time, the market has evolved in two dimensions: the breadth of PaaS use cases and the providers. Today, PaaS offerings -- or more aptly, managed offerings -- extend beyond compute to include databases, machine learning (ML), security, operations and network offerings, Potter said.

"Increasingly, we are seeing [IaaS] providers, i.e., public cloud service providers, move 'up the stack' to offer PaaS services that reduce the administration burden on engineers building solutions on their core infrastructure services," Potter said. "Similarly, SaaS providers move 'down the stack' to provide their customers the ability to create custom solutions that integrate tightly with their core software systems."

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are unique cloud computing offering categories with their own use cases, Potter said.

IaaS delivers core infrastructure services, e.g., networks, compute and storage. PaaS delivers platform tools for application or service development, he said. PaaS is built on top of core infrastructure services. SaaS delivers complete applications that serve specific business needs, typically with options that enable configuration and slight customization.

"Each category provides a different level of technical flexibility and accompanying operational complexity," Potter said. "PaaS is significantly less complex than IaaS to manage. The reduction in complexity comes at the cost of flexibility -- engineers are bound by the scope of services offered by the PaaS platform. Conversely, PaaS services offer greater flexibility than SaaS solutions, but at the cost of added operational complexity. Pizza is often used as an analogy for describing IaaS-PaaS-SaaS differences. IaaS is likened to take and bake, PaaS to pizza delivery and SaaS to dining out."

At the most general level, PaaS is a set of development services aligned with a public cloud provider and/or a multi-cloud container development platform, said Lee Sustar, an analyst at Forrester Research. This has evolved as cloud providers have woven managed services throughout their IaaS and PaaS. Today, it's more appropriate to group PaaS as part of cloud development services that typically include database services, big data, AI/ML and IoT.

IaaS gives the customer the most control, flexibility and availability on the cloud, said Michael Gibbs, CEO of Go Cloud Architects, an educational organization focused on cloud computing technologies and based in Port St. Lucie, Fla. IaaS is effectively using the cloud as a virtual rented data center.

"IaaS may cost more than PaaS," Gibbs said. "And IaaS does require more management overhead than PaaS, and it requires more sophisticated personnel."

IaaS, SaaS and PaaS are all about reducing the complexity of information technology, Cameron said.

"In information technology, you have a lot of overhead in managing physical and virtual infrastructure," he said. "You have hardware and software refreshes, and licensing, and patching, and administration. All of those are very manual-intensive and create regular or ongoing challenges for IT departments."

IaaS organizations reduce the complexity of managing the compute and storage of physical infrastructure for servers -- they can create VMs without worrying about the underlying infrastructure as long as there is sufficient capacity allocated to the system, according to Cameron.

"Someone still needs to manage everything -- physical hardware, virtual and the servers -- but you can start to separate those roles out easier and outsource to a cloud vendor if you like," he said.

SaaS reduces the complexity even more than with IaaS -- divorcing a company's consumption of IT from the underlying platform almost entirely, Cameron said. All the company has to worry about is bringing its data to the system or interacting with an application. The physical and virtual bits below the application simply aren't relevant to the organization and are included in the cost of the service.

"[One] concern with SaaS is that you have no control of the application," Gibbs said. "If the SaaS provider does not have a high availability strategy and the SaaS provider has an outage, all their customers will lose service."

In addition, SaaS applications often have less flexibility than custom-delivered applications on either IaaS or PaaS, according to Gibbs.

PaaS fills a gap between IaaS and SaaS, Cameron said. It was born out of a frustration with managing increasingly complex IT infrastructure.

"We needed to give IT consumers the ability to use pre-configured services to build more complex applications without understanding or having to manage the underlying infrastructure," he said. "This allowed us to rapidly create and deploy applications comprised of building blocks and helps to remove the latency of engaging the information technology organization from bringing that value to customers -- internal or external."

With PaaS, environments scale as needed, Gibbs said. PaaS environments can also be more agile, enabling faster deployment and development of new applications. PaaS enables organizations to reduce overhead because the cloud provider performs much of the management.

PaaS is the cloud computing technology of choice for developers, said Tony DiGiorgio, chief architect at Symplr, a provider of healthcare governance, risk management and compliance tools.

"It is a technology framework or environment that provides a space for developers to build applications without worrying about the infrastructure underneath," he said.

Organizations that use PaaS vendors can stay focused on designing and building new capabilities and features into their products, and ultimately deliver those products to their clients faster, DiGiorgio said. Companies that use PaaS services don't have to worry about the underlying management around updating servers, patching OSes and other maintenance tasks required to maintain digital environments.

An example of a PaaS offering is AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which helps developers deploy apps on the AWS cloud. Other PaaS providers include Salesforce, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, SAP, VMware and Microsoft Azure. The IBM Cloud platform combines PaaS with IaaS to provide an integrated experience.

PaaS offerings give developers the ability to build their applications more quickly by offering pre-built solutions to many of the common problems that developers encounter, said Mohammad Hashemi, co-founder of Gadget, a developer productivity company in Ottawa. They also greatly decrease the cost and effort associated with scaling applications because the platform handles much of that.

In addition, PaaS delivers a framework that developers can use to create customized applications.

Another benefit of PaaS is that the responsibility for continuity of the service doesn't fall entirely on an organization's shoulders, said Pavel Kuznetsov, deputy managing director of cybersecurity technologies at Positive Technologies in Framingham, Mass.

"For enterprises that contribute to the service with their own code and tools, they share this responsibility with the PaaS provider, and for organizations that don't contribute their own code or tools, the responsibility falls entirely on the PaaS provider, which is even better," Kuznetsov said. "Organizations also don't need to hire support for the service anymore."

The challenge is taking advantage of native cloud services while mitigating the risk of lock-in to the platform or its underlying infrastructure, which is a growing concern as multi-cloud strategies are adopted by enterprises and large governmental organizations, according to Sustar.

Gibbs said that the challenges of PaaS include the following:

"The global pandemic has been an accelerator event, driving organizations to bring forward and collapse multiyear programs into shorter time frames to address the demands of new flexible ways of working," said John Rostern, senior vice president and global lead of cloud and infrastructure security services at NCC Group, a consultancy based in Manchester, England.

PaaS enables organizations to get to production faster and easier, he said. Business demands to get to value sooner are driving the practicality of putting PaaS at the end of the CI/CD pipeline, an evolution supported by the development community that has always preferred to focus on code rather than building and maintaining infrastructure.

"The flip side to this is the age-old skills gap, with cloud skills already in high demand being compounded by adding developer PaaS talent to the priority list," Rostern said.

As in most every industry, COVID-19 will have a major effect in the overall spend growth on the PaaS market over the next five to 10 years, according to DiGiorgio.

"Because businesses were forced to adopt and work differently, they needed technology that provided more nimble options for developers -- hence the pandemic resulted in a more pervasive adoption of PaaS technology," he said.

PaaS has evolved a lot in the last few years and is blending with IaaS, said Becky Trevino, vice president of product marketing at Snow Software in Stockholm. PaaS consumption is increasing as the traditional IaaS consumers have matured and are more comfortable putting services in the cloud, whether it's IaaS or PaaS. COVID-19 has also affected PaaS market growth by accelerating this blending of PaaS and IaaS.

"Because organizations were forced to adopt the cloud and accelerate their digital transformation, these organizations began examining how they could offload other tasks," Trevino said.

COVID-19 certainly increased the demand for digital services and put pressure on developer teams to ship faster, said Tyler Jewell, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, the venture capital arm of Dell Technologies. However, while PaaS businesses grew in 2021, they didn't grow at a faster rate than they did prior to COVID-19, he said.

PaaS is the new IaaS, according to Insight's Cameron. In 2019-2020, the second or third big wave of IaaS cloud movers had completed full or partial uplifts to the cloud, and many of those that weren't moving at that time started updating skills and strategies to begin their own cloud journeys.

A lot of them learned the lessons of those who came before -- they started to upskill their staff, update processes and think about what it really meant to move to the cloud rather than just throwing a few virtual machines on a public cloud platform, he said.

"There is also a lot more general experience with cloud platforms in the market at this point -- engineers are starting to get a good idea where IaaS and PaaS and SaaS all fit within their IT services stacks and how to optimize placement of workloads on the optimal platforms," Cameron said. "Hybrid and multi-cloud are now the default rather than the exception -- most customers are starting with a much more nuanced and realistic vision of where public cloud fits in their organizations."

Positive Technologies' Kuznetsov said that the leading PaaS trend in 2022 will be the further enhancement of computing powers -- essentially, the urge to integrate with edge computing before reaching the clients themselves.

"But we need the next computing technology breakthrough," he said. "Instead of building more data centers, the industry should devise a plan to significantly raise the quality of computing, e.g., practically implement quantum computers and start using them en masse."

"As for the future, half a glance at the booming PaaS vendor market will speak volumes, with AI platform as a service tipped as the next hot topic already well warmed up," NCC Group's Rostern said.

Indeed, the PaaS market size is expected to grow from an estimated $56.2 billion in 2020 to $164.3 billion by 2026, according to a research report from MarketsandMarkets.

Expect to see vendors increasingly consolidating IaaS and SaaS functionality into PaaS, and leading PaaS through its maturity cycles to establish standards and practices, Rostern said. Only then will it hit true escape velocity, and we can expect to see PaaS cyber hygiene stability hit its full stride.

"In the market today and across our clients, we observe two consistent themes," Deloitte's Potter said. "One, the importance of data-driven decisions at scale to maximize customer value and open new market offerings. Two, the refocus of talent to high-value activities using automation to replace low-value activities."

With those two themes considered, in 2022, ML-focused PaaS offerings will mature and better integrate with the provider's service ecosystem and enable engineers to bring data-driven solutions to market faster, Potter said.

Given the increasing adoption of PaaS platforms -- which Deloitte doesn't expect to slow down -- technology firms will continue to place significant investment in their PaaS offerings in 2022 and beyond, he said.

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The state of the PaaS business model and market in 2022 - TechTarget

RIYADH: As Saudi Arabia weans itself off a dependence on oil in favor of a more diversified and innovative economy and culture, there is a need for one asset above all: knowledge.

Specifically, knowledge of the STEM subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics, and their practical application in daily life.

Computer scientist Mohammed Alsolami, 35, is on a mission to provide just that with his startup company Robotics LLC.

Alsolami founded Robotics in 2014 in the US state of Maryland, where he was conducting doctoral research into the use of Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things for crowd control, having already gained no less than three masters degrees from multiple US institutions.

In 2019 he registered a sister company with the same name in Riyadh.

Alsolami is something of an ideas machine. He developed a wrist-worn device which guides an individual through crowded spaces, keeping them in contact with their friends and family while warning of over-congested areas useful in Makkah during the Hajj season. He also created an agri-tech sensor which provides home-growers and farmers with essential data as to when plants and crops need to be irrigated.

However, Alsolamis present commercial focus is on the training of young people, aged eight to 22, in the construction and manipulation of robots.

His training programs, 12 days in duration, were first launched in Makkah with face-to-face classes of no more than 15 students, using curriculum licensed from Woz U the tech training institute established by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and other academic sources. All his courses are translated into Arabic, making them accessible to any young Saudi.

In 2020 Alsolamis enterprise was hit by the COVID 19 epidemic, bringing live training sessions to a sudden halt. But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as he was able to launch his classes online and achieve much more rapid growth, with both trainers and trainees located across the Kingdom.

Robotics shifted its HQ to Riyadh and presently operates with nine full-time staff along with some forty freelance trainers. The company has delivered over 400 courses to both individual and institutional clients, the latter including the Kingdoms Royal Commission schools.

Alsolami and his team are now working hard to make the courses fully automated. The whole operation should be online by April of this year, he told Arab News. Clients will be able to select, pay for and take their course via an online dashboard, the only human contact being with the actual trainer, who will also be online.

While grounding youngsters in AI and IoT, Alsolamis courses develop important life skills such as teamwork and leadership because building and programming a robot, for example to throw a ball, is normally a collaborative activity.

Because of Covid restrictions, trainees currently work individually, but hopefully once the epidemic has passed, they can form groups in a physical location to build a single, more ambitious robot and enter local and international robotics competitions as a team.

Currently delivering courses to about one thousand trainees per annum, Robotics has turnover of about SR1 million ($270,000). Revenue comes from two sources: course fees SR1,000 per head and the online sale of robotics kits, with the hardware currently being sourced from China.

Were now looking for pre-seed investment of about $1 million. That will help us to develop the online dashboard, build up our operation to 20,000 clients annually by mid-2025, and to produce our own robotics kits here in the Kingdom and on a much larger scale.

Alsolami is confident of achieving this. Most parents he surveyed share his belief that educating young people in amateur robotics will help prepare them for the Kingdoms future smart economy.

Education always pays the best interest, Alsolami says. And with Vision 2030, we at Robotics are focused on building the capacity and supporting the talent of our leaders of tomorrow. This is our KPI and our vision. And this is how we hope to serve our country and serve the world.

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Saudi Arabia attracts $2bn investments in cloud computing in the past two years - Arab News

31/01/2022 EU Automation

The cloud-native approach is often conceptualised using thePets vs. CattleDevOps concept, which compares traditional server systems, which are unique and cared for, to pets and cloud systems to cattle. Cattle are identical, assigned, scalable systems where if one of the systems were to be unavailable or fail, the whole network would not be affected. In this piece, Neil Bellinger, head of EMEA atglobal automation parts supplierEU Automation, delves into the native cloud and why it is the future of manufacturing.

Given the value of the cloud, one wonders why the manufacturing industry is resisting the move to cloud-native systems, especially with companies already using various cloud-based applications.

Until recently, manufacturing industries have been up to date with the latest innovations, from production tracking systems to artificial intelligence. Although financial and retail sectors have followed business giants like Netflix and Spotify, many still resist the switch to cloud-native. While83 per cent have a strategy for cloud implementationestablished, many still struggle to visualise the business value and cost savings of the cloud-native approach. However, forward-looking businesses are making the first steps in this direction. For example, one company currently implementing cloud-native applications is Volkswagen, training more than 200 specialists for its cloud-innovation centre.

Cloud-native is the term used to describe software and services that run on the internet instead of a local computer system, allowing businesses to be faster and more agile.Cloud-based applications, however, are not created in the cloud but instead transferred from an in-house web application to a cloud server. This cloud-based system allows for the availability and scalability of cloud-native applications without redesigning current applications.Cloud-enabled is similar to cloud-based, with the migration of the traditional application to the cloud. However, it does not have easy availability and scalability of cloud-based or cloud-native.

Some examples of cloud computing in the manufacturing industry are cloud-based marketing, product development, production and stock tracking, and productivity management.

The responsiveness, innovative features and zero downtime deployment of the cloud-native model provide businesses with a database needed to succeed in modern times. Successful examples of this implementation are Netflix and Uber. Netflix currently operates using over 600 services, with an update rate of around 100 times per day. The structural design of the cloud-native enables the rapid response, scalability, and selective deployment observed in companies such as Uber, Netflix and Spotify.

The cloud-native revolution

Cloud-native is the clear future of all businesses, including manufacturing. As seen in the last two years, implementing changes to aid when mass disruption like the pandemic occurs is extremely important for business survival. With accessibility possible from across the globe via the internet, the cloud-native approach is the best change companies could make.

The restriction of large on-premise systems has held back the manufacturing industry for years, but cloud-native applications enable companies to use small, reusable and independently deployable microservices. It can also allow the automation infrastructure, application delivery, recovery and scaling to increase, providing a more resilient and high performing system. The cloud-native model can also aid in lessening the strain of managing back-end software and infrastructure.

Cloud-native apps also enable the sharing and analysing of data across the organisation by being the central repository for data flowing fromsensors, machines, programmable logic controllers (PLCs),and more. At EU Automation, we value the importance of keeping with the times and understanding the cost of downtime. Cloud-native is the next step in lessening the impact of failures in company systems.

If you wish to stay informed about the developments of the cloud-native approach and how to unlock success in an industry 4.0, visit EU AutomationsKnowledge Hub.

Process and Control Today are not responsible for the content of submitted or externally produced articles and images. Click here to email us about any errors or omissions contained within this article.

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Pets versus cattle: cloud computing in manufacturing: The benefits of cloud-native applications in manufacturing - Process & Control Today

Startup Sync Computing emerged from stealth mode today with $6.1 million in seed funding in a bid to help enable distributed cloud infrastructure for artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data workloads. The company also announced the launch of Sync Autotuner and Sync Orchestrator.

Based in Boston, Sync Computing is a spinout from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where Suraj Bramhavar and Jeff Chou co-founded the company. The core premise that underlies Sync is that modern cloud infrastructure isn't properly optimized to run distributed workloads across different cloud services.

As part of Sync's launch, the company is also launched Sync Autotuner, a service that helps automatically tune and optimize cloud infrastructure for a given AI, ML or big data workload running the Apache Spark query engine.

In addition, the startup announced Sync Orchestrator, a compute resource orchestration tool for enabling different workloads to run across a distributed cloud infrastructure.

"The larger vision of what we're building is a globally optimized resource allocation and scheduler that is custom-designed for the cloud," Chou, Syncs CEO, told ITPro Today.

Typically, users with a big data job must manually determine what resources are needed on a given cloud platform, which can be a complex process, according to Chou.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has all manner of virtual instance types, with different configurations offered at various on-demand, reserve and spot pricing. Different resource types can impact performance as well as cost.

Another challenge is the orchestration of jobs. With certain AI, ML and big data workloads there are dependencies, such that one particular operation needs to run after another. Manually scheduling the timing and sequence of events is also a complex task, Chou said.

Sync Computing is aiming to enable its users to define their own business goals for a particular workload, whether the goal is better performance or cost optimization, Chou said. He noted that Sync provides an abstraction on top of compute resources, figuring out the details to help users reach business goals.

Chou said the optimization approach that Sync Computing uses is not based on machine learning. Rather, Sync Autotuner uses what he referred to as a mathematical model.

"There are companies that help tune various applications, but they require running the application for a week to train a model," Chou said. "For us, there is no training. We basically mathematically model Amazon's hardware and cost model, as well as Apache Spark."

As such, Chou claimed that a user could just direct the workload to Sync Computing, which will automatically calculate the right place and time to run a job.

While Sync Computing is starting off by helping optimize Apache Spark workloads across distributed cloud infrastructure, Chou said the plan is to enable various types of distributed computing workloads as the platform and the business continue to grow.

"When we first started, we were fundamentally just research scientists, so we had to find the right product andmarket," he said. "We do want to be a horizontal platform company, so that includes anything that benefits from distributed computing, like TensorFlow, PyTorch and other frameworks."

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Sync Computing Launches with Distributed Cloud Infrastructure Tech - ITPro Today