Online advertising giant Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) reported fourth-quarter and full-year results after market close on Monday. The quarter's results featured more strong top- and bottom-line growth, fueled by advertising across its Google properties and network members' properties, as well as its cloud computing business -- Google Cloud.

While the overall financial results are worth looking over, the most notable takeaway from the report for investors is the company's first-ever disclosure of YouTube and Google Cloud revenue. Both businesses are seeing outsize growth compared with the rest of Alphabet's business.

Image source: Alphabet.

Alphabet reported fourth-quarter revenue of $46.1 billion 17.3% year over year over. Total advertising revenue from online Google properties was $31.9 billion, up from $26.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. Revenue from ads on network members' properties was $6.0 billion, up from $5.6 billion a year ago. "Google other" revenue, which now excludes revenue from Google cloud, increased from $4.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018 to $5.3 billion.

Earnings per share for the period were $15.35, up from $12.77 in the year-ago quarter.

The company's top- and bottom-line performance was mixed in comparison to what analysts were expecting. Revenue missed an average analyst forecast for $46.9 billion whileearnings per share of $15.35 easily beat a consensus estimate for $12.53. This earnings-per-share beat, however, was because the company's fourth quarter of 2019 saw a 0% tax rate thanks to one-time items, including the resolution of multi-year audits, compared with an 11% tax rate in the year-ago period.

Alphabet broke out its YouTube advertising revenue, which is included in its Google properties revenue, for the first time. YouTube revenue was $4.7 billion, growing 31% year over year. The streaming video service, therefore, accounted for 15% of Alphabet's Google properties revenue and 10% of total revenue.

In the company's earnings release, Alphabet notes that non-advertising YouTube revenue such as subscriptions to YouTube Premium, are included in "Google other" revenue, alongside hardware and Google Play app store revenue.

The company's Google Cloud revenue, formerly reported in Google other revenue, was $2.6 billion -- up 53% year over year.

For some context, that compares withAmazon.com's (NASDAQ:AMZN) cloud computing revenue of $7.4 billion during Q4. While Google Cloud is still much smaller than AWS, the world's largest cloud computing business, it's notably growing more rapidly than Amazon's cloud business. AWS revenue was up 34% year over year in Q4.

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Alphabet Breaks Out YouTube and Cloud Revenue for the First Time - Motley Fool

TLDR: The Complete 2020 Microsoft Azure Certification Prep Bundle can land you a six-figure job working on this in-demand cloud platform.

For the past decade, Microsofts cloud computing platform Azure has quickly worked to get on its feet, while trying to chip away at Amazons market dominance. Funny thing is, after the companys first serious revenue bump in two years from its Azure unit, Wall Street is starting to pay attention.

Whether or not this is the surge that puts Microsoft in range of its herculean competitor, Azure architects are already finding a healthy job market, with average salaries from $99k to $198k a year. You can join those well-paid ranks with the training found in The Complete 2020 Microsoft Azure Certification Prep Bundle ($42.90, over 90 percent off).

With 11 courses including over 50 hours of instruction, students can find all the background they need for building, nurturing and protecting a network, site or app of virtually any size or shape in Azure.

Once up to speed on using Azure, these courses explain how to put a system infrastructure in place, how to protect data from attack and advanced troubleshooting to knock out any network problems before they become problems.

These courses also get students ready to ace four vital Microsoft-endorsed certification exams, tests that validate their skills and prove their readiness to handle a high-paying role as an Azure administrator.

A $2,000 value, this limited-time deal gives you each course for less than $4 each while this offer lasts.

Prices are subject to change.

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Want to make $150K a year? Microsoft Azure training could be your ticket. - The Next Web

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{Originally posted to Rabbi Weinbergs website, The Foundation Stone}

I often heard teachers complain to my parents that His head is in the clouds. Well, my head is in the clouds, more specifically in cloud computing. Please dont ask me to explain what it is or how works, but it does mean that you dont need a hard drive to backup your information. Everything exists somewhere out there in the ether. Computing is going to change yet again. Just when I finally got the hang of writing blogs, running a website, and sending out newsletters and e-mail, now I have to learn a whole new system. Its getting to be a little too much. How are we to manage all of this change?

If Im having trouble managing these changes I wonder how the Children of Israel managed all the changes in their lives over the course of this weeks Portion: first they leave Egypt, then they turn back, only to find themselves stuck between the Egyptian army and the sea. The sea splits and then drowns the Egyptians. Moshe uses a branch of bitter wood to sweeten bitter water. God provides a magical water supply, and then they start receiving magical bread. They have to fight their first battle. Its far too much change all at once for people who have been slaves until just a few days ago.

We are taught that their heads too, were in the clouds: God went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them on the way. (Exodus 13:21) Did they really need the cloud to guide them? Moshe was leading them, and I suspect that he knew exactly where to go. The cloud was not a GPS, it was a reminder of the benefit of having our heads in the clouds: The cloud was an invitation to extend their reach, to remind them that each time they experienced a life changing miracle they could live far beyond their perceived limitations. God wanted their heads in the cloud, unconstrained by the realities of this world, but as elevated as the first cloud: A mist ascended from the earth and watered the whole surface of the soil. And God, the Lord, formed the man of dust from the ground. (Genesis 2:6-7) From the first moments of mans existence the dust, the physical, raised his eyes up toward the cloud to become an unlimited being.

Whether its learning about cloud computing or discovering a new insight into a verse, my head, heart and soul are in the clouds; They are constantly reaching for greater heights. I look to that cloud that led us through the desert, and through it to that first cloud, and reach for so much more. This is the cloud described as the Presence of God. It is still there for all of us willing to have our heads in the clouds.

Shabbat Shalom

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Head In The Clouds - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

The National Science Foundation will help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms. The funding builds on R&D technology formed under a partnership which includes Red Hat, among others.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: cloud, FPGA, MOC, NSF, open, R&D, Red Hat, testbed,

The National Science Foundation will help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

The NSF grant supports an innovative public-cloud testbed initiative co-founded in part by Red Hat, alongside academia, government and other private and non-profit firms.

The grant which was awarded to a research team from Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts -Amherst (UMass) to fund development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

The testbed, known as the Open Cloud Testbed, will integrate capabilities previously developed for the CloudLab testbed into the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), of which Red Hat is a founding partner.

Under the grant, Red Hat will work with Northeastern University and UMass, as well as other government and industry collaborators, to build the national testbed on Red Hats open hybrid cloud technologies.

This project will construct and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms - the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. It will further speed the tech transfer of such cloud technology from academia to commercial and practical use.

In specific, the new testbed will combine proven software technologies with a real production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware - Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) - capabilities not present in other facilities available to researchers today.

The combination of a testbed and production cloud will allow

(a) larger scale compared to isolated testbeds,

(b) reproducible experimentation based on realistic user behavior and applications, as well as

(c) a model for transitioning successful research results to practice.

NSF described the focus and rationale for the grant as follows:

The project will support educating the next generation of researchers in this field, and existing relationships with industrial partners of the affiliated production cloud will accelerate technology transfer from academic research to practical use.

MOC was launched in 2014 to bring together academia, government, non-profit, and industry to create an "open, production-grade public cloud suitable for cutting-edge" R&D. Red Hat was a co-founder and has served as a core partner ever since.

The MOCs open cloud stack is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

Officials cited several goals and expected benefits from the investment in the MOC-based testbed. Among them:

Speaking about the award, Michael Zink, associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), University of Massachusetts Amherst, said, This testbed will help accelerate innovation in cloud technologies, technologies affecting almost all of computing today.

By providing capabilities that currently are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, the new testbed will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, thus democratizing cloud-computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open-source communities. We look forward to continuing the collaboration in MOC to see what we can accomplish with the testbed.

Orran Krieger, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University; co-director, Red Hat Collaboratory; PI, Massachusetts Open Cloud has this to say.

An important part of the MOC has always been to enable cloud computing research by the academic community. This project dramatically expands our ability to support researchers both by providing much richer capabilities and by expanding from a regional to a national community of researchers.

MOC is currently managed at Boston Universitys Hariri Institute for Computing. Other commercial / open source vendors supporting MOC include: Cisco, EMC, SGI, Juniper, Canonical, Dell, Intel, Mellanox, Brocade, DataDirect Networks, Mathworks, Plexxi, Enterprise DB and Riverbed.

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NSF To Fund National Cloud Testbed That Uses Core Technology from Red Hat, Others - Integration Developers

In 2020, expect cloud computing to dominate the market, as it will continue to be the platform for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and Internet-of-Things

February3, 20207 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

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From being seen as a leverage for cost, cloud computing has become one of the most defining trends in the past five years. Today, cloud computing is being used as a key agent for business transformation, and the clear deployment model of choice for modernizing existing information technology infrastructure. Investments in cloud computing have steadily grown. For example, IDC predicted that cloud spending in India on public cloud services and infrastructure will reach $2.9 billion in 2019, an increase of 34.5 per cent over 2018, according to IDC Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. Although annual spending growth is expected to be moderate during the forecast period 2017-22, IDC predicts that the market is expected to hit a five-year compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.9 per cent in public cloud services spending.

This year too, expect cloud computing to dominate the market, as it will continue to be the platform for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and Internet-of-Things (IoT). In 2020, we see the following seven big cloud computing trends that will shape up enterprise computing:

In a multi-cloud world, hybrid cloud will continue to be the deployment model of choice as more flexibility is offered to enterprises by multiple cloud providers. Research firm Gartner, for instance, predicts that by 2020, 75 per cent of organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model. Another report by research firm, MarketsandMarkets, found that the demand for hybrid cloud is expected to be driven by several factors, such as cost efficiency, scalability, agility and security. The firm predicts that the hybrid cloud market will grow from $44.6 billion in 2018 to $97.6 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 17 per cent. The firm believes that hybrid cloud provides economies of scale while simultaneously delivering security to the sensitive information of businesses.

A survey by Cisco predicts that the number of devices connected to IP networks will be more than three times the global population by 2022. Similarly, a Gartner study forecasts that 14.2 billion connected things will be in use in 2019, and that this total will reach 25 billion by 2021, producing immense volume of data. A McKinsey study claims that 127 new IoT devices connect to the Internet every second. This clearly has a big impact on the way data centers are built, as companies will require smaller data centers at the edge and place it closer to the location where data is being generated. This has given to the rise of edge computing. Gartner states that by 2025, 75 per cent of enterprise-generated data will be created and stored at the edge. Similarly, anIDC FutureScapereport states that by 2022, 40 per cent of enterprises will have doubled their information technology asset spending in edge locations and nearby co-location facilities versus core data centers to deliver digital services to local users and things.

In the digital age, businesses operate at a hectic speed. This is an era of instant consumption, and enterprises cannot wait for their information technology systems to deliver the services at a pace that traditional systems offer. Organizations need an IT infrastructure that can scale at an extremely quick pace to provision increased demand and then scale down appropriately when demand reduces. This has led to the demand for hyper-scale data centers. Hyper-scale refers to the capability of an IT system or architecture to scale exponentially and rapidly to respond to demand that is increasingly heavily. A report by Markets&Markets estimates the hyper-scale data center market to grow from $25.08 billion in 2017 to $80.65 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 26.32 per cent. Cisco estimates that by 2021, traffic within hyper-scale data centers will quadruple, and hyper-scale data centers will account for 55 per cent of all data center traffic by 2021. Due to the modularity of hyper-scale data centers, data center operators can replace individual physical components, which gives organizations extreme flexibility in scaling at the physical level, as components can be added modularly.

As more organizations take the digital route, the cost of downtime is increasing rapidly. A report by IBM states that the average cost of a data breach is close to $3.92 million. According to Gartner, the averagecostof ITdowntimeis close to $5,600 per minute. Of course, this depends on the business that the organization is in. For example, if it is an e-commerce firm, the cost can be disastrous as downtime means missed opportunities for sales. At the same time, regulations such as GDPR have mandated that organizations need to handle the data of citizens with extreme care. Organizations need to be legally compliant and also confident that their disaster recovery strategies are in place. This has encouraged organizations to increasingly look at DR-as-a Service, as an automated DR strategy can significantly reduce the recovery time. IDC estimates that the DRaaS market will reach $4.5 billion in 2020 with a 15.4 per cent through 2023.

Hyperconvergencean IT framework that integrates storage systems, servers, and networking into one single platformhas emerged to be a popular choice due to its promise of centralized and simple monitoring, while increasing scalability. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 20 per cent of business-critical applications currently deployed on three-tier IT infrastructure will transition to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Research firm Mordor Intelligence predicts that the hyperconverged infrastructure market is expected to register a healthy CAGR of over 13 per cent from 2019-2024. The firm says that HCI solutions are increasingly emerging as the ideal alternative to public cloud platforms as these systems are simple to manage and help reduce the costs associated with traditional data center systems.

2020 will see increased use of AI in the data center. From saving energy to detecting patterns in server or network hardware failures, AI can be used to proactively to solve problems before they occur. AI-based platforms can also help data centers in learning from past data and distribute workloads across peak periods more efficiently. AI can also help organizations in solving skill shortage issues. Gartner, for instance, predicts that by 2020, 75 per cent of organizations will experience visible business disruptions due to infrastructure and operations skill gaps (an increase from less than 20 per cent in 2016). AI can play a big role in automating many of the tasks that human agents do today. The impact of AI is such that Gartner predicts that more than 30 per cent of data centers that fail to sufficiently prepare for AI will no longer be operationally or economically viable by 2020. AI-based services and solutions will be delivered using the cloud.

The build it once, run it anywhere mantra of containers has found huge interest among organizations. By 2023,Gartner predicts that more than 70 per cent ofglobal organizations will be running more than two containerized applications in production,up from less than 20 per cent in2019. Similarly, IDC predicts that 95 per cent of new micro-services will be deployed in containers by 2021. As containers simplify deployment, management and operational concerns associated with a hybrid cloud, they are expected to see a huge rise in deployment, in line with the growth observed with respect to the hybrid cloud.

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7 Key Cloud Computing Trends That Will Shape Enterprise Computing In 2020 - Entrepreneur