Baidus Silicon Valley research lab (Baidu Photo)

Baidu plans to announce a sweeping expansion of its partnership with graphics chip maker Nvidia on Wednesday, bringing Nvidias latest chips into Baidus cloud services for artificial intelligence research and optimizing Baidus deep learning system.

The two companies have been working together on AI-related projects for a few years now, and the new agreement, scheduled to be announced during the Baidu Create 2017 AI developer conference, expands on much of that existing work.

Baidu is the Google of China, with over 75 percent of that countrys internet search market share and hundreds of millions of active users for other internet services it offers, including public cloud computing.

Its also one of the worlds leading researchers in artificial intelligence, a division that until recently was led by former Stanford professor and AI expert Andrew Ng. Former Microsoft search and AI expert Qi Lu is now the president and chief operating officer at Baidu, and the company is expected to challenge rivals like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft in artificial intelligence research for years to come.

For its part, Nvidias GPUs (graphics processing units) are being snapped up left and right by AI researchers to run their models, and are also offered by all the major public cloud providers as a service to their customers. Google is mounting a challenge with its Tensor Processing Units, but Nvidia has a lot of momentum on its side.

We see AI transforming really every industry, and our strategy is to help democratize AI everywhere, said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of accelerated computing at Nvidia, in a briefing last week.

The new Nvidia-AI partnership consists of four segments.

Artificial intelligence services are expected to be the next big area of competition for public cloud providers. There are only a handful of companies in the world that can afford to do leading-edge AI research, and most of those companies also happen to be among the few who can afford to invest in the massive computing power that enables the public cloud.

As Amazon Web Services Swami Sivasubramanian put it at our GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit last month, AI research concepts have been long been discussed, but what has accelerated adoption of it is that we have specialized compute infrastructure, such as GPUs, specialized CPUs, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), you name it. In this new market for chips, Nvidia is in the drivers seat.

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Nvidia, Baidu expand AI partnership to include cloud GPUs and self-driving cars - GeekWire

With its promises of lowering costs and fostering a more agile IT, cloud computing holds an almost magical allure for many companies today: They think moving an application or two to the cloud will solve all their problems, said Ed Featherston, vice president and principal architect at Cloud Technology Partners.

"Then they get the bill at the end of the month and go, 'Oh my God, what happened?'" Featherston said at the recent Cloud Expo in New York. "The magic doesn't happen by itself. You actually need to plan."

In this SearchCIO video, filmed on the concourse of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Featherston and two other cloud watchers discuss the biggest cloud computing challenges IT execs are dealing with today.

Sumit Sarkar sees another type of struggle. He's a data evangelist at Progress, a vendor of data integration and data interoperability services. As organizations build cloud architecture, plugging in new technologies and services, "data is getting somewhat more abstracted," or not immediately and easily available to analytics professionals, who need to slice and dice it.

"If I build these microservices, my data is behind these different APIs. What if I have a data science practice team? How do I make sure they have access to data to really bring business value?" Sarkar says. IT executives and their business counterparts have to keep that in mind as they're "rearchitecting and refactoring all of their systems."

Greg Bledsoe, managing consultant at Accenture, says companies moving to the cloud need to adopt new ways of working. Bledsoe helps companies make the transition to DevOps, the software development process that emphasizes frequent interaction and communication between development and operations teams.

Cloud computing, he says, makes experimenting cheap. "If it doesn't work, throw it away. But companies are still managing their cloud infrastructure as if it were physical infrastructure."

So someone on the business side might request a new tech project from IT, gets it, tries it out, but then it's not quite right.

"Throw something back over the wall and have somebody hoist it back over the wall to you. This makes no sense for cloud," Bledsoe says. "It's totally a legacy artifact of our past management strategies that is completely unnecessary."

What cloud computing challenges plague IT execs today?

Ed Featherston: The biggest struggle I've seen with clients in cloud is fully understanding what it is and what it isn't for them -- and what it's going to provide them. The classic of, 'If I go to the cloud, it's going to solve all my problems.'

One of my favorite mantras is 'No technology negates the need for good design and planning.' Cloud is no exception. And the biggest challenge I see people having with cloud is if they don't do that first. If they just say, 'Oh, I'm just going to take this workload, I'm going to drop it in AWS [Amazon Web Services], I just log into the console, fire up a couple instances -- boom, I'm off to the races.' Then they get the bill at the end of the month and go, 'Oh my God, what happened?'

The magic doesn't happen by itself. You actually need to plan. You need to understand 'What am I going to get out of it? Am I going to the cloud for cost savings?' Then you better look really closely at it when you do that.

I was talking with somebody earlier about the fact that -- you move your first application over and you say, 'OK, why am I not saving any money?' Well, because the servers that application was on still have five other applications on them. I still have to maintain them. I still have to pay for them. So, I'm paying for those servers still. Plus, now I'm paying Amazon or [Microsoft] Azure for that cloud instance that I just created, so I'm actually spending more money. You actually have to think that out if you're going for the agility and being able to move faster. Do your development processes and operations processes support that capability? Yes, cloud can make you very agile -- if you have the processes in place to do it. If you're still a standard, Waterfall development type of shop that has no concept of what development and operations are and tying them together, the cloud's not going to make it go faster for you. If anything, it's probably going to make it go slower if you're not ready for that.

So those are the kinds of challenges I see clients having out there. It's getting those expectations set. It's part of why I enjoy being where I am at our company, because it's one of the things we push really hard with the clients -- of No, we're not going to start with, Go to the cloud. We're going to start with, What do you want from it? Let's look at what you've got, let's understand how we're going to get there and what the stumbling blocks are -- then, we start moving to the cloud.

Sumit Sarkar: What we're seeing is there's a lot of people who start -- I don't know if they're buzzwords, but at the show in the morning we had a kickoff about cloud-native architectures, and there's 12 attributes of them. And then there's something -- I think I heard the term cloud washed: You take an application, you stick it in the cloud, and you rebrand it as cloud.

But the thing is, in between, there's a big mix of different levels. I think with the innovation that's happening is that between a cloud-native architecture and something that's cloud-washed, for example, there's a whole lot of things happening in innovation. So I've heard different people who are taking maybe some NoSQL technologies to supplement an ERP system. Some people are building out some microservices on top of existing databases if you have a distributed data architecture.

So, what's happening is data is getting somewhat more abstracted as we have this spectrum of cloud-native and, let's say, untraditional or the monoliths. So they decompose these things, data gets moved around, make it scalable. So, what's happening is it's causing a challenge for the analytics professionals. So, if you think about the people doing operations intelligence, that is the last thing sometimes people think about. I encourage folks, the CxO people, to think about analytics as they're rearchitecting and refactoring all of their systems. Think about it: If I build these microservices, my data is behind these different APIs. What if I have a data science practice team? How do I make sure they have access to data to really bring business value? Or I have this data engineering team who can really build these nice data repositories to get 360-degree intelligence. How do I make it easy for them to get the data?

So that's what we're seeing in the connectivity space is, How do you provide connectivity for those professionals to still access data as you're refactoring these things in that big spectrum? So the CxO folks, they have these initiatives, and that's something to really think about is, Don't forget the data integration for analytics.

Greg Bledsoe: Because we've come from this legacy of managing physical infrastructure, and we're used to managing physical infrastructure in a very tightly controlled way to protect our investment and control cost, we bring that same mindset to cloud.

This mindset does not really apply to cloud. You don't have to pay for things when you're not using them. The whole power of cloud and the reason that cloud empowers DevOps is because you've cheapened experimentation. It has become dirt-cheap to try something, and if it doesn't work, throw it away.

But companies are still managing their cloud infrastructure as if it were physical infrastructure. And you have a DevOps team or someone that sets up cloud infrastructure for you, you put in a request, you put in ticket, and someone builds something, and a few days later you get a response with some things that are built. And then you start trying to use those and it's not quite right; you do this again. Throw something back over the wall and have somebody hoist it back over the wall to you. This makes no sense for cloud. It's totally a legacy artifact of our past management strategies that is completely unnecessary. So there are mechanisms that you can use to protect your cost and investment without having to centrally manage these architectures -- which is essentially the exact opposite of DevOps. It's a DevOps team that's another silo that doesn't really collaborate to solve the problem. It just becomes another source of wait time, another source of wheel spinning and another source of invisibility to the other teams.

This is exactly how to do DevOps wrong. And a lot of people are trying to implement it this way because it fits in with what they understand. It fits in with what they know. Because they haven't really understood yet that DevOps is a completely different way to manage everything from the infrastructure to the people.

Mekhala Roy filmed this video.

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Cloud computing challenges today: Planning, process and people - TechTarget

Microsoft and file-storage startup Box have signed a deal to sell each other's products, the latest blurring of the lines between friends and rivals in the growing business of cloud-computing.

Box builds web-based file storage and management tools, services that compete head-to-head with Microsoft's own OneDrive and Sharepoint.

Despite that rivalry, the companies have agreed to jointly sell Box services and elements of Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform, they said on Tuesday.

The companies say their engineering teams are also working on building more links between their products, including adding Azure the Box Zones program. That effort lets Box customers opt to store their content in specific areas of Azure's massive global network of data centers. (Box Zones already includes Azure rivals Amazon Web Services and IBM).

Cloud-computing has made some partnerships that would have seemed bizarre in the world of out-of-the-box business software of a generation ago. Microsoft during its dominance of the personal computer heyday developed a reputation for pushing customers to use its range of products at all costs, and shunning those developed by others.

But as the company prioritizes growth in its Azure cloud-computing platform, which enables other companies to build services on Microsoft's network of data centers and rented software services, the Redmond firm has abandoned some of its scorched earth tactics. The company, analysts say, is betting that customers who plug into the cloud will demand that the products they use work well with those of other technology vendors.

Box, based in Redwood City, Calif., began as a startup founded by a pair of college students in Mercer Island. The company is among a slate of startups born in the cloud era that has thrived by building on-demand, web-based tools that replicate or improve on programs companies used to run from their own servers. Box held an initial public offering in 2015, and had sales of $425 million during the most recent 12-month period.

2017 Seattle Times syndicated under contract with NewsEdge/Acquire Media. All rights reserved.

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Microsoft Signs Cloud Computing Partnership with Box - Cloud ... - CIO Today

As one company in the cloud monitoring space announces funding, another goes a different route: Microsoft has confirmed it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Israel-based Cloudyn.

The move will help Azure customers manage and optimise their cloud usage, as a blog post from Jeremy Winter, director of program management Azure security and operations management confirming the news explained.

This acquisition fits squarely into our commitment to empower customers with the tools they need to govern their cloud adoption and realise the strategic benefits of a global, trusted, intelligent cloud, Winter wrote. Cloudyn capabilities will be incorporated into our product portfolio that offers customers the industrys broadest set of cloud management, security and governance solutions.

In a message from the CEO missive, Cloudyn chief exec Sharon Wagner added: When we started this journey, our goal was to build a great company, attract the best and brightest talent and provide the best business management solution for all clouds. We have strived to help our customers be their companys cloud heroes, and hope we have succeeded.

The news comes in the same week that CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud service management provider, announced series D funding to the tune of $46 million (35.8m). Unlike Cloudyn, however, CloudHealths open stance is to move towards IPO.

As a result, the space is certainly heating up. Mindy Cancila, Gartner research director, was quoted in a recent article saying that interest in cloud management tools is very high right now. This publication featured Cloudyn as far back as 2012 the company was founded the year before as one of the cloud 300 companies of movers and shakers in the then-relatively nascent industry.

Back then, as this blog from author Ray De Pena noted, Cloudyn only supported AWS, with Microsoft integration arriving later that year. Wagner told De Pena that his company could provide 41% cost reduction through price optimisation and rightsizing, restructuring assets for the highest value. In comparison, Winter noted one US-based Fortune 500 customer of Cloudyn had seen a 286% return on investment with regard to their cloud efficiencies.

The acquisition move was not unexpected by those inside the industry. In April, Israeli publication Calcalist reported (Hebrew) that Microsoft was negotiating the acquisition of the cloud monitoring and cost optimisation provider at a cost of between $50 million and $70 million.

Financial terms of the deal however were not disclosed.

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Microsoft to acquire Cloudyn as cloud management space gets hot - Cloud Tech

The Microsoft case has been less headline-grabbing than Googles news-dominating mega-fine this week, but it is the far more important case of the two. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

A week may be a long time in politics, but in business, just five days has been time enough for two developments that will worry many tech multinationals with European Union operations.

First came the US department of justice (DOJ) decision late last week to request the US supreme court hear an appeal in the internationally significant Microsoft Dublin email case.

Then, early this week, the European Commission smacked an extraordinary 2.4 billion fine onGoogle, having determined, after a seven-year investigation, that it had violated EU anti-trust laws by using a dominant position in the search market to favour its own shopping listings service.

The two cases are different in scope and implication, but both will fray nerves in boardrooms and executive suites worldwide.

The Microsoft case has been less headline-grabbing than Googles news-dominating mega-fine this week, but it is the far more important and potentially devastating case of the two.

Thats because while the Google decision may restrict how some internet-based businesses operate across the EU, the Microsoft case, if overturned by the US supreme court, would devastate one of the fastest-growing areas of business cloud computing undermining the foundation for how data is stored and handled.

Because most businesses worldwide rely on at least some international handling of data, this exposes Business with a capital B, not just the tech or internet-based sectors.

The case involves a judges demand that Microsoft hand over emails held in Ireland for a New York state case. Microsoft refused. But importantly, it has not fought compliance with lawful government requests, but rather how this particular one was made: without going through existing international agreements by which US authorities would normally request permission from and work with Irish authorities to access the emails.

The US has argued that Microsoft is an American company, giving US courts the right to directly demand the emails, regardless of where they are held. However, this is misleading. First, the US is trying to treat digital data as a different category of evidence. If the desired evidence were concrete (say, paper documents) rather than digital, US authorities would have to use existing international law-enforcement agreements. Digital is, wrongly, a legislative grey area.

Second, as Microsoft president and chief counsel Brad Smith argued in a blog post last week, if the US government has the right to directly seize internationally-held data, then other countries will of course, expect the same right to in effect conduct international digital raids for American or other nations data, in the US or around the world, with near-impunity.

This raises obvious data-protection, data-privacy, and surveillance concerns. It also completely undermines the whole concept of cloud computing the movement and storing of data by organisations in international jurisdictions and suggests businesses would have to run stand-alone operations and data centres in every geography in which they operate.

Having the supreme court hear this case would be a pointless waste of the courts time. As Smith notes, US legislators already accept that fresh legislation is needed to clarify and better streamline access to digital evidence. In the US, bipartisan efforts have begun in this regard.

A supreme court ruling could curtail or prematurely affect needed legislation. Hence, the DOJ referral request is unneeded and potentially catastrophic.

As for the Google case, the writing was on the wall for this decision for some time, as the company had failed in several attempts to reach a settlement with the EU over those seven years. The decision is likely to have a number of impacts.

First, it signals the EU is willing to make business-affecting decisions, backed with gasp-inducing fines, against multinationals seen to compete unfairly in areas of market dominance. And keep in mind the EU competition commissioner still has two ongoing investigations into other areas of Google business, its Android mobile operating system and its Ad Sense online advertising.

Overall (and without knowing yet the details of the judgement), the EU is showing it will closely examine and regulate competition in market verticals. Many other market-dominating companies in such verticals Amazon, for example, or Apple must be nervous.

The willingness to impose major fines is a sharp shock, too. For years, EU actions have been seen as minor swats, not big wallops. Big fines will certainly focus corporate minds.

Finally, the EU, interestingly, is moving firmly into an anti-trust watchdog role the US has only dithered in for the two decades since the DOJ went after Microsoft on anti-trust grounds (using Windows to shoehorn its Internet Explorer browser on to desktops). The US abandoned its own anti-trust investigation of Google two years ago.

And that, of course, is an historical connecting thread in the two current cases.

Google says it may appeal the EU decision. Microsoft, when under further anti-trust investigation in the EU in past years, eventually decided the best, business-stabilising approach was to settle with the EU.

But these days Microsoft has led corporate efforts to confront the US government on over-reaching data access.

An interesting turn of affairs, indeed.

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US action on Microsoft email case could devastate cloud computing - Irish Times