A blog post on the Wall Street Journal reported Netflix (NFLX) said it plans to shut down its remaining data centers by the end of the summer and migrate the last of its data to a public cloud. Netflix said its streaming services have been 100% cloud-based for “some time now” and said it is “fully reliant on Amazon Web Services” in relation to IT infrastructures such as servers. In 2008, Netflix moved the first of its data to AWS and it was reported in the last two years it moved its big data platform and billing and payments to AWS infrastructure.
In Q2, BroadSoft posted revenues of $64.5 million, up 23% year-over-year. The company generated $9.6 million in cash from operations for the quarter.
Chinese Internet and e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA) announced that its cloud computing and internet infrastructure business grew 106% from a year ago. The company said in its earnings report for the June quarter that the segment produced revenues equivalent to $78 million. Alibaba claims it is the market leader in Chinese cloud computing services. In the press release, Alibaba listed some of its Chinese customers including internet publisher Sina Weibo, gaming company Play800, and state-owned public service provider China Rail Customer Service Center. The Rail Center used Alibaba’s services to handle its peak capacity of 29.7 billion page views prior to the Chinese New Year in 2015. Overall, Alibaba’s revenue grew by about 28% for the quarter to $3.27 billion.
Startup Platform9, which provides software for automatically deploying an OpenStack private cloud on existing servers, announced that it closed a $10 million Series B funding round. The round, led by Menlo Ventures, brings Platform9’s total funding to $14.5 million. Simultaneously, Platform9 announced general availability of its managed OpenStack software designed for VMware vSphere environments. Platform9 was founded last year by early Vmware engineers and has seen quarterly revenue growth of 200%, license agreements for over 400 servers, and deployments in 17 countries.
Software-defined networking startup Anuta Networks announced that it has successfully concluded a project with dominant Australian telecom provider Telstra to demonstrate that Anuta’s NCX networking platform can monitor and manage multiple network elements across Telstra’s cloud platform. A Telstra executive is quoted in the news release saying that the Anuta platform “offers capability that supports our Telstra Cloud network automation to allow customers to easily and quickly connect with our partner clouds.”
Anuta CEO Chandu Guntakala said that Telstra “pioneered a new business model” with its multi-vendor cloud model. He said he looks forward to “further innovation opportunities” for Telstra, an indication that Anuta is looking for the successful project to lead to significant revenue. For more on Anuta’s SDN architecture, check out last year’s Daily Cloud profile.
Australian data center operator Metronode announced that telecom provider Telstra has agreed to sell data center and colocation services to its business customers at Metronode’s ten Australian data facilities. Metronode highlighted its private (dedicated) cloud and hybrid cloud solutions, saying customers could migrate private cloud solutions to its data centers without having to re-design any existing cloud infrastructure. Metronode plans to add an eleventh data center, in Canberra, Australia, in September 2015. Telstra reported $19.5 billion in revenues for its last fiscal year. Cloud services revenue grew by about 32 percent for the year according to its annual report.
Google (GOOG) lifted the lid on some of the key networking innovations in its own vast data center infrastructure, partly as a means of promoting the Google Cloud Platform public cloud business. In a blog post written by Google fellow Amin Vahdat, Google said that its current internal network, which is known as Jupiter and is the fifth generation version, has 100 times the capacity of the first generation network. Vahdat cited several important Google innovations that have increased the capacity of switches and streamlined network management. Google’s networking innovations have increased the focus on so-called “hyperscale” technology, which aims to bring innovations from Google or other very large operators to enterprise-scale infrastructures.
Vahdat suggested that Google would become more open about its internal data center architecture to promote GCP to customers: “Since the same network powering Google infrastructure for a decade is also the underpinnings of our Cloud Platform, all developers can leverage the network,” he wrote in the post.
IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced the availability of new Linux mainframe servers and committed to invest further in open source software for its LinuxOne and z systems line. The announcement was timed to coincide with LinuxCon, an industry conference in Seattle dedicated to Linux and open source software. IBM said it will invest in open source platforms including Apache Spark, MongoDB, Chef, and Docker. IBM said the new Linux systems can be provisioned as a virtual machine through the open standards-based KVM hypervisor. IBM also announced a developer cloud for the new system for developers to develop, pilot, and test workloads. In its last quarter IBM global revenue declined by 13%, while its cloud revenue increased by 70%, to reach an $8.7 billion twelve-month run rate.
Microsoft (MSFT) announced the general availability of its Azure Data Factory, a cloud-based service for automating data movement in cloud environments. Existing data processing services are made into data pipelines connecting on-premise and cloud data sources. In an executive blog post, Microsoft said customers like electrical supply store Rockwell Automation, Alaska Airlines, and actuarial and consulting firm Milliman are already using these data integration services. Microsoft said Milliman cuts IT costs by 30% and reduced reporting time by 95% using a suite of Azure cloud services, including Azure Data Factory and HDInsight.
At a press briefing in South Africa, Attila Narin, a senior executive at Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, said AWS recently opened a new office in Johannesburg. He revealed that AWS plans to hire around 250 people over the next twelve months in technical roles. Narin said the new office is to support the growing customer base in South Africa and to support start-ups as they transition to AWS. According to IT News Africa, AWS executives named several South African-based companies as AWS customers, including telecom provider MTN, Standard Bank, and travel booking web site Travelstart.
AWS has no data centers in Africa. It serves African customers primarily from its two European data centers, in Ireland and Frankfurt, Germany.
