DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Cloud Computing Market in Europe" report to their offering.

Whilst not on the scale of the industry in US, European Cloud computing continues to be a quickly developing and fast growing industry. Organizations have sought cloud solutions to reduce expenditure, widen productivity and scale, and increase computing power in light of Big Data issues. Western European countries are ranked significantly higher on the World Economic Forum Network Readiness rankings than those in the East. The European Cloud Computing industry is expected to generate total revenues of $18.9bn in 2016.

Who Should Read This Report

Executive leaders and business unit leaders, procurement managers, advisors, Investors who have responsibilities to set their organization on a Digital transformation and cloud journey.

What You'll Know After Reading

Readers will get a deeper understanding of the current adoption level, market drivers and challenges of cloud services in European organizations which would help IT vendors to market their products and services effectively in Western and Eastern European region. The report covers the impact of Brexit and how cloud services vendor can penetrate European market keeping in mind other issues related to data privacy and protection, data accessibility laws, email spam laws etc.

Cloud service providers can look into the IT spend areas by countries and their forecasts till 2021. With growing adoption of cloud services, European enterprises continue to see IT security as a major barrier to adoption which is continuously haunting the enterprises.

Companies Mentioned

Key Topics Covered:

1. Overview

2. Market Size and Forecast

3. Europe Cloud Computing Market, By Cloud Models

4. Europe Cloud Computing Market, By Country Breakdown

5. Market Approach Post Brexit

6. Europe Cloud Computing Adoption Trends

7. UK - Cloud Computing - An overview

8. UK Government Cloud Spending

9. UK Cloud Computing - Market Size and Forecasts

10. UK Cloud Computing Market, By Cloud Models

11. Competitive Analysis

12. Germany Cloud Computing Market - An Overview

13. Germany Cloud Computing Market Size and Forecast

14. Germany Cloud Computing Market, By Cloud Models

15. Germany Cloud Computing Market - Competitive Analysis

16. Cloud Security: Continues to Remain a Concern

17. Key Aspects for Cloud Service Provider (CSP) Selection

18. Key Recommendations

19. Europe Cloud Service IT Spending (US $ Million), By Countries, 2014-202

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/jhdgts/cloud_computing

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170316005681/en/

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$18.9bn Cloud Computing Market in Europe - European Enterprises Continue to See IT Security As a Major Barrier to ... - Yahoo Finance

Rapid growth in cloud computing revenues helped lift Oracle Corp.s fortunes in its third fiscal quarter reported today, as its profits easily beat forecasts on a 2 percent rise in revenues.

The Silicon Valley software giant reported a profit of 69 cents a share before certain costs such as stock compensation, up 7 percent from a year ago. Sales rose 2 percent, to $9.2 billion, or $9.3 billion after backing out the impact of foreign exchange rates.

As in previous quarters, Oracle showed particular strength in two cloud categories: online applications known as software as a service, or SaaS, and platform as a service, or PaaS, a collection of technologies for creating and deploying those applications. In those two areas, Oracles revenues shot up 73 percent, to $1 billion, the first time theyve topped that milestone. The growth was likely helped by Oracles $9.3 billion NetSuite acquisition last year, since this is the first quarter after the closing of the deal.

Total cloud revenues, including infrastructure as a service or IaaS, the base-level computing and storage layer dominated by Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., rose 62 percent, to $1.2 billion, up 62% in U.S. dollars and up 63% in constant currency. Total cloud and on-premises software revenues rose 4 percent, to $7.4 billion.

Our pivot to the cloud is now in full swing, co-Chief Executive Safra Catz said during the earnings conference call. She added that cloud revenue growth has overtaken declines in license revenues, and predicted that in the next fiscal year,cloud revenues will surpass software license revenues.

Analysts on average had expected a 62-cent profit, down about 3 percent from a year ago, on $9.25 billion in revenues, up 3 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. Its only the second time in the past nine quarters that Oracle has shown year-over-year revenue growth.

Investors liked what they saw and Oracles shares rose in after-hours trading, nearly by 5 percent after the earnings conference call started. In regular trading today, shares rose a little under two-thirds of a point, to $43.05. The reaction is a reversal from the second quarter, when Oracle missed expectations despite continued growth in cloud computing as software license revenues fell more than forecast.

The company still depends on sales of licenses for business software such as databases for most of its revenues. But with rivals such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure getting an early lead in the cloud, often with competing applications, Oracle and its co-founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison (pictured) have been making an aggressive push into cloud computing for the past three years. Co-Chief Executive Mark Hurd last year predicted cloud technologies would constitute 80 percent of information technology budgets by 2025.

Hurd took the opportunity to point out Oracles lead over another cloud superstar, Salesforce.com Inc. Over the last year, we sold more new SaaS and PaaS than Salesforce.com, and were growing more than three times faster, he said in a statement. If these trends continue its just a matter of when we catch and pass Salesforce.com in total cloud revenue.

Likewise, Ellison took more shots at Amazon Web Services, which he had singled out at the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference last fall. He said Oracles second-generation IaaS is faster and lower-cost than Amazon Web Services. As a result, he said on the call, Some of our largest customers are negotiating huge Infrastructure as a Service contracts to move all their databases to the cloud. He said some such deals will happen in coming weeks.

And now our biggest customers can run their largest and most demanding Oracle database workloads in the Oracle Cloud something that is absolutely impossible to do in the Amazon Cloud.

The race to become a force in the cloud isnt coming cheap, however. Oracle continues to spend big on its cloud computing. Research and development alone grew to $5.1 billion in fiscal 2016, up $2 billion from six years ago, much of the increase from rewriting software for the cloud and creating new cloud services.

Catz set a new, higher fourth-quarter profit forecast of 78 to 82 cents a share on total revenues ranging from down 1 percent to up 2 percent. That includes the expectation that currency headwinds will have a 2 percent negative impact on revenues and depress profits by 2 cents a share.

On the cloud front, Catz said Oracle expectsSaaS and PaaS revenues to rise 69 percent to 73 percent. IaaS revenues could grow in a range of 25 percent to 29 percent. Over time, she added, gross margins on the cloud business will be about 80 percent.

The company alsoraised its quarterly dividend by 4 cents, to 19 cents.

Read more:
Cloud computing growth lifts Oracle's profits, and its shares - SiliconANGLE (blog)

Photograph by Getty Images

Larry Ellison doesn't mince words when it comes to his competitors.

The Oracle ( orcl ) executive chairman on Wednesday described Amazon ( amzn ) and Microsoft ( msft ) as defeated rivals in cloud computingat least when it comes to the quality of their technology.

On an earnings phone call with analysts, Ellison said that Oracle now has a huge technology lead over Amazon Web Services and Microsofts Azure cloud computing service. Several times, he bragged that Oracles revamped cloud computing service is both cheaper and faster than the competition, and that it will eventually become Oracles crown jewel.

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The Oracle co-founder is known for his grandiose statements and prodding of his business adversaries. But his comments on Wednesday entirely glossed over the fact that both Amazon and Microsofts cloud businesses are growing rapidlyand inconveniently to Oracle, exponentially bigger.

In the latest quarter, Microsofts cloud business sales rose 8% to $5.9 billion. Meanwhile, Amazon's cloud business, which only includes computing infrastructure, and not software or database services, jumped 47% to $3.6 billion during the same period.

Oracle, on the other hand, said that its total cloud sales were $1.2 billion its latest quarter, a fraction of the size of its top two competitors. Although its quarterly cloud sales rose 62% from the previous year, Oracle still has a long way to pass Amazon and Microsofttwo companies that dont appear to be slowing down.

Oracles cloud software and developer tool business accounted for the bulk of its overall cloud sales with combined quarterly sales of $1.01 billion. But selling on-demand computing power to customers is where Ellison really wants Oracle to dominate.

Currently, so-called infrastructure-as-a-service is merely a speck compared to Amazons. Oracle's quarterly sales in that category was a diminutive $178 million in the latest quarter, up only 2% from the same period a year earlier.

A big concern for Ellison is if customers switch their existing Oracle databases to AWS, something Amazon has been heavily encouraging . Doing so makes those customers more inclined to use Amazons portfolio of cloud services rather than Oracles.

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At several points during the conference call on Wednesday, Ellison said that Oracle customers should run their Oracle databases in Oracle's cloud. Citing no source, he said that AWS can only handle "relatively small databases" compared to bigger ones that he claims will run "ten times faster in the Oracle cloud versus the Amazon cloud. Of course, Amazon would refute Ellison's description. And, in fact, Amazon has a long list of big customers who use its servers as a home for their huge databases.

It's unclear if big businesses will buy Ellison's sales pitch, but for now at least, investors seem to be.

Oracle's shares ( orcl ) rose 5.34% in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $45.38

Link:
Oracle's Larry Ellison Belittles Amazon and Microsoft - Fortune

The cloud is already playing a key role in education -- and that part will only grow in coming years.

On-demand IT has reached a tipping point and organisations of all sizes and sectors are using cloud computing services to run and develop their businesses.

But where does the cloud go next and what are some of the interesting use cases that will help take cloud to the next level?

Four business and tech leaders discuss what the cloud now means for their businesses.

1. Overcoming legacy concerns to leave the internal data centre

Okta CIO Mark Settle runs his organisation, an identity management specialist, using about 140 cloud-based applications. "I have no data centre to worry about," he says. "It makes the budgeting cycle so much easier. You basically look at your list of SaaS subscription fees and project what the future costs will be like. It can be done in as little as 90 minutes."

Settle recognises that this shift from capital to operational expenditure will have a fundamental impact on the role of the IT leader. "It's the future and it's also a very different approach from the one I've taken in any of my previous businesses," he says, looking back on a career that has included seven CIO positions.

Settle believes the cloud is now a business-as-normal activity. "Almost all executives are looking to go cloud first now -- there's very few people writing software and buying new servers to run those applications in a data centre," he says. However, he also appreciates that key challenges remain, particularly regarding legacy applications.

"On the infrastructure side, the cloud has moved from something used for testing and development to a platform for production services. People are becoming increasingly confident moving systems to the cloud and getting their stuff out of the internal data centre," says Settle.

"However, it's also a fallacy to think that large, global enterprises are going to completely abandon their data centres. I think there'll always be legacy applications that need to be maintained in-house, be that for cost reasons or a desire not to disrupt how systems work currently. The hope has to be that cutting-edge work around containerisation will help some of the doubters to deal with their legacy concerns."

2. Using on-demand IT for almost everything

The future of the cloud, says CIO consultant Andrew Abboud, is very closely related to preconceived notions of on-demand IT. "Let's get this straight," he says. "Executives around the business don't talk about the cloud -- they're not interested in the technology per se, they just want to solve the business challenges they face."

CIOs must help ensure the hype surrounding the IT industry does not get in the way. "As technologists, we get hung up on buzzwords when we should be focused on the opportunities," says Abboud. "Every organisation is different and every business must understand how the cloud will deliver benefits."

Once the CIO has helped the rest of the business to establish the context of implementation, the key debate is simply how far an organisation can push its use of on-demand IT. "We're seeing a move towards online services across business and, in the future, the key question concerns saturation -- in most cases, why wouldn't you use the cloud for everything?"

Abboud recognises concerns persist, such as around information security and the porting of legacy applications. But he is hopeful such challenges can be overcome effectively. "If you accept the logic that an external cloud provider is going to be more secure than an internal data centre, then you should really push as much of your business to the cloud as possible," says Abboud.

"Legacy applications can be a problem, especially in the finance sector. But every industry must bite the bullet and transform eventually. CIOs need to appreciate that the Cobol specialists will die out -- you have to deal with change now."

3. Boosting real-time marketing and sales communications

Experienced CMO Sarah Speake says cloud computing is a welcome addition to the marketeer's digital kit bag. Analysts spend a great deal of time investigating the role of CIOs and CMOs in an age of decentralised purchasing. Speake says the next frontier for the cloud involves CMOs helping their departments to make the most of on-demand capability.

"We should take collective responsibility for up-skilling our teams sufficiently to navigate cloud-based apps and tools appropriately to drive speed, efficiency and transparency," she says. Speake, who is an experienced CMO who has held senior marketing positions at ITV and Google, says cloud-based systems can help marketers move away from dangerous assumptions.

"For all too long, we shared key documents, like Excel spreadsheets, internally via email, never knowing whether the one we were inputting into or scrutinising to drive in-depth customer segmentation was the most current or not," she says. "Accuracy was an unknown quantity, so our responsibilities in driving additional leads and revenues to the bottom line were often hard to prove."

Speake says cloud computing can provide further boosts for marketeers, such as through real-time access to customer relationship management data or via integrated marketing automation and communication. Once again, she says CMOs -- rather than CIOs -- can help people across the business to make the most of cloud-based services.

"In part, our role is to help our sales friends continuously assess customer prioritisation, depending on short- and long-term revenue potential," she says. "Equally, we will need to revise our own marketing communications to ensure we're driving leads or maintaining existing customers depending on our organisational business model."

4. Enabling education and development from any location

Matt Britland, director of ICT at Lady Eleanor Holles School, says his school uses Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365. Both implementations are managed internally by the school. He says sensitive data relating to the school is not stored in the cloud. However, the technology is already playing a key role in education -- and that part will only grow in coming years.

"The cloud allows our students to work from any location as long as they have an internet-connected device," says Britland. "The cloud has to be part of the future of education because it enables learning to happen everywhere."

He is currently running a cloud-based project that allows pupils to work in teams and collaborate on the same project. The school's use of cloud-based productivity apps is also extended to staff. Britland says the right preparations are crucial.

"It can be a challenge explaining the software and its benefits to people who are new to the cloud," he says. "You have to put the right training in place and I've been running training courses. Most education professionals, however, are keen to learn and explore new opportunities."

Read more here:
Cloud computing is the new normal: Is it time to use it for everything? - ZDNet

Gary Bloom is chief executive of the enterprise database company MarkLogic Corp. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

In a situation nearly every company will face, one of the Internets brightest stars has highlighted the value of not getting locked into a single cloud computing provider.Snap Inc., creator of the messaging app Snapchat, recently revealed that it will spend $1 billion over five years on Amazon Web Services and may eventually build its own infrastructure.

The move will provide redundant infrastructure support of our business operations, Snap said in an amended S-1 registration statement for its initial public offering of shares. Snaps first filing spurred headlines, in part, because itdisclosed how closely Snaps fortunes are tied to Google Inc.s cloud, on which it said it would spend $2 billion over five years.In both filings, Snap said it relies on Google Cloud for the vast majority of its computing, storage, bandwidth and other services, and that any disruption of or interference with our use of theGoogle Cloud would seriously harm our business.

Heres the scariest part: Any transition of the cloud services currently provided by Google Cloud to another cloud provider would be difficult to implement and will cause us to incur significant timeand expense, Snap said. It also warned, If our users or partners are not able to access Snapchat through Google Cloud or encounter difficulties in doing so, we may lose users, partners oradvertising revenue.

Its pretty clear that giving the bulk of its cloud services to a single supplier is a huge risk to Snap.The company is, as The Information recentlynoted, the biggest consumer Internet company to be built from scratch on top of cloud computing infrastructureit doesnt own. It alsoreported that Google is giving Snap deep discounting and other benefits.

Discounts are enticing, but cloud lock-in is a risk to Snaps operations and economics. By warning that it may build its own infrastructure, Snap could keep its cloud suppliers honest. But that has meaning only if Snap can quickly and seamlessly transition its information technology operations from one cloud provider to another or to its own infrastructure. Cloud neutrality in what Snap builds, how it builds itand how the company runs its systems will have to be a key attribute of its daily development operations if Snap is going to benefit from a cloud neutrality strategy.

Thisrisk is not unique. By 2020, all companies will be doing something in the cloud. The cloud vendors, led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp. and Google, will want to run and manage theircustomers capacity and may even extend discounts for volume.

For now, that may not seem like a bad deal. For many enterprises, the cloud is mostly about fundamental services, such asstorage and elastic compute capacity. The underlying architecture is standardized around Intel hardware and Linux, which works in any cloud environment.

MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom (Photo: MarkLogic)

The lock-in starts when you move to the software services and application layer of the software stack. Cloud providers offer proprietary APIs that reduce the amount of code or work required to getapps going. By using proprietary APIs, you get hooked into that vendors ecosystem. To move services to another cloud vendor or back in house will take, as Snap warned, significant time andexpense.

Enterprises may not even realize theyre getting sucked in. Almost all applications being created rely on a database. Anybody who codes software for Amazons DynamoDB database is basicallylocked into AWS as a cloud provider. Any software written for DynamoDB cant be moved to another cloud provider or transitioned on-premises unless it is rewritten, which is costly and timeconsuming.

In addition to the time and expense to transfer Google Cloud services to another provider, Snap said it has built its software and computer systems to use services provided by Google, some ofwhich do not have an alternative in the market. This comment leaves an open question as to whether buying AWS services alone is enough to mitigate the risk of cloud lock-in. It wont if theyhave to rewrite applications and change their DevOps to benefit from cloud neutrality.

Sadly, companies have been locked in before, when they chose to outsource their IT operations to providers such as IBM Corp. and Electronic Data Systems. They thought experts could manage their IT operations and datacenters better and more cost-effectively.

In the beginning, the economics looked encouraging. Then prices went up on three-year and five-year contracts as outsourcing vendors normalizedexpenses and added margins.They certainly never planned to lose money forever. Eventually, companies paid more for outsourced work than they spent in house. Yet they couldnt reclaim thework because everyone who knew how to manage it now worked for the outsourcing companies, or companies no longer owned their own data center infrastructure.

Enterprises should avoid cloud lock-in so they can get the benefits they get from any competitive marketplace, such as:

* Bargaining on price.Just as pricing increased for IT outsourcing when the suppliers added margin to the equation, so it will for the cloud. By 2020, most cloud consumers will see cloud computing billsthat are significantly higher than on-premises costs. The ability to go somewhere else will be key.

* Picking winners.We are early in this cloud transition, which 451 Research has said represents the biggest IT opportunity in decades. It is too soon to know which companies might dominate.AWS may look like a runaway leader, but Microsoft has made impressive gains. Who knows what innovations and improvements other companies may forge? In three to five years, differentclouds will focus on different things. Youll want to take advantage of what works for you.

* Being more secure. No one is ever completely safe from potential cyberattacks. If a cloud provider has a breach, you may need to move quickly to another provider. Being cloud neutral is aninsurance policy.

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The many costs of cloud computing lock-in - SiliconANGLE - SiliconANGLE (blog)