Category Archives: Cloud Providers

Awards, Cloud Providers, News

WSO2 Ranked No. 5 In ‘Highest-Rated Cloud-Computing Companies to Work For’ List

Battery Ventures Names WSO2 Among Private Cloud Companies with Highest Levels of Self-Reported Employee Satisfaction 

WSO2, the leader in digital transformation technology, was recently recognised as one of the highest-rated cloud-computing companies to work for in the sixth-ever list released by Battery Ventures, the globally, technology-focused investment firm, created with data provided by Glassdoor.

The list recognises the top 25 private and top 25 public companies—all business-to-business (B2B) cloud-computing companies—where employees self-report the highest levels of satisfaction at work, according to feedback shared on Glassdoor, a provider of insights about jobs and companies. WSO2 ranks in the Top 5 companies among Cribl, Notion Labs, Ironclad, and Experience.com. Glassdoor was a Battery portfolio company.

“Being recognised as one of the top 5 cloud-computing companies to work for in 2023 by Battery Ventures is a testament to the dedication and passion of our global team. At WSO2, we believe that fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and inclusivity is at the heart of our success. It reaffirms our commitment to providing an exceptional workplace where our employees can thrive and continue to drive innovation in the technology space,” said Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder and CEO of WSO2.

“The companies on this year’s Highest-Rated Cloud-Computing Companies to Work For list have managed to create and preserve stellar corporate cultures during a very tumultuous time in the technology markets—and also as traditional workplace norms, like working in the office, have dramatically shifted post-Covid,” said Neeraj Agrawal, a cloud-computing investor and Battery general partner. “Cultivating employee happiness and satisfaction is more challenging than ever, so we commend this year’s winners for their efforts.”

“Company culture is pivotal for attracting elite talent and sustaining a competitive edge in the marketplace, and its significance becomes even more pronounced in challenging economic times. We hope that all companies featured on this list will take pride in this well-deserved recognition,” added Brandon Gleklen, a Battery principal.

To qualify for the 2023 list, a cloud company must have received at least 30 company reviews on Glassdoor between the 1st of July 2022 and the 30th of June 2023. The private-company report tracks independent, non-public cloud companies that, according to Battery research and data from research service Crunchbase, are based in the United States; have a B2B business model; are categorised as SaaS, software, cloud computing and/or enterprise software, according to Crunchbase; have more than 200 employees as of the 7th September 2023, according to company data provided to LinkedIn; and have raised funding on or after the 1st July 2019.

The full private and public company lists can be found here: https://www.battery.com/blog/highest-rated-cloud-companies-2023

 

About WSO2

Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the largest independent software vendor providing open-source API Management, Integration and Identity & Access Management (CIAM) products and the next-gen internal developer platform, Choreo. WSO2 enables thousands of enterprises in over 90 countries globally to drive their digital transformation journeys. Using WSO2 products and platforms, these organisations are harnessing the full power of their APIs to securely deliver their digital services and applications. Our open-source, API-first approach frees developers and architects from vendor lock-in, enabling rapid digital product creation. WSO2 is also the inventor of the open-source integration-friendly programming language, Ballerina. Our consistent recognition as leaders by various industry analysts underscores our commitment to excellence and innovation in the technology space. WSO2 has over 800 employees worldwide with offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, the UK, and the US, with close to USD100M in annual recurring revenue. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more.

Cloud Providers, News

Alibaba Cloud Unveils New Services to Solve Generative AI Development Issues for Global Customers

Global cloud leader joins forces with technology partners to accelerate application development innovation

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced a series of innovative AI products and services at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Global Summit. The comprehensive set of new products are designed to meet the burgeoning demand for Generative AI development from customers worldwide.

The extensive AI solutions from Alibaba Cloud, spanning from AI computing platforms to AI acceleration services and AI-centric applications, are designed to assist customers in creating their own Generative AI applications in a more efficient, security-focused, and cost-effective manner.

Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said: “To cater for the thriving demand for generative AI, we are constantly introducing innovative products and services to tackle different pain points of our global customers. Our comprehensive AI services are designed to help customers seize the unparalleled opportunities offered by this unstoppable technology trend.”

“As part of our commitment to foster more inclusive and innovative application development for generative AI, we have been joining forces with industry leaders to further extend our capabilities for different scenarios,” added Yuan.

Comprehensive AI Services for Generative AI Development

  • To reduce AI process complexity, Alibaba Cloud introduced PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Service, a comprehensive AI computing platform for high-performance computing tasks, such as foundation model training and inference. It offers large-scale deep learning and intelligent computing capabilities on Alibaba Cloud. The service also provides full-process AI engineering capabilities, including AI development, AI training, AI role management, and computing resource management. The platform, already in use in Mainland China, will be available in Singapore from early 2024, followed by more general availability across Asia throughout the year.
  • To accelerate AI model training and inference, Alibaba Cloud launched Alibaba Cloud AI Acceleration Solution, which uses leading datasets and hardware accelerators to manage data-intensive applications, optimising the utilisation of computing instances to expedite AI model training and inference tasks. According to the Stanford DAWN Deep Learning Benchmark, it can speed up AI model training by 70% and inference by up to three times. The solution includes layers for cloud-native AI suite, AI job scheduling, AI data acceleration, AI computing acceleration engine, resource scheduling, and computing resources, with each layer offering specific acceleration solutions for different scenarios.
  • To simplify building AI-based search service, Alibaba Cloud unveiled OpenSearch LLM-Based Conversational Search, its proprietary large-scale distributed search engine that enables intelligent search services in e-commerce, multimedia, social media, and big data queries in enterprises. Empowered by large language models, the service allows enterprises to rapidly build a dedicated conversational search system, ensuring security, accuracy, and reliability in search results. It also supports multimodal search results such as answers, URLs, and images to cater to specific business search requirements.

Technology Partnership to Foster Innovative Application Development

Alibaba Cloud announced a series of partnerships with global technology leaders to offer customers more advanced and security-focused cloud services, accelerating their digital transformation journey:

To promote innovative application development for enterprises, Alibaba Cloud collaborates with Red Hat to make Red Hat OpenShift, a platform for building, deploying and managing applications at scale, deployable on Alibaba Cloud. Red Hat OpenShift on Alibaba Cloud combines the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes with Alibaba Cloud’s robust hybrid infrastructure. Optimised with full-stack automated operations, it offers a more consistent experience across environments to help customers boost productivity more effectively.

Accelerate Digital Transformation for Global Customers

Alibaba Cloud also announced collaborations with enterprise customers in markets including Malaysia, South Korea, United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, underscoring its unwavering commitment to its over four million global customers in exploring new opportunities presented by digital transformation and new AI trends.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.

Cloud Providers, Hyperconvergence, News

Micron Selects Nutanix Cloud Platform for Its Manufacturing Facilities Globally

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced that Micron Technology, an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, selected Nutanix to build a cloud platform for Micron’s manufacturing facilities globally. The Nutanix Cloud Platform will enable Micron to optimise its infrastructure resources, efficiently operationalise new cloud-ready applications, dramatically reduce costs, and pivot quickly as new opportunities to adjust workloads between private and non-private cloud environments emerge.

Nutanix offers a secure, resilient and scalable technology stack that supports modern application development, the most data-intensive workloads and hybrid multicloud flexibility.

“We are proud to have provided Micron with a solution that they expect will meaningfully reduce their cost, while also enabling enhanced agility in deploying new products and responding to changing market demands,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO of Nutanix. “We see this win as a testament to the performance, scalability and total cost of ownership benefits delivered by our platform, and our ability to expand our footprint within some of the world’s largest companies.”

“Nutanix enables Micron to build on our established industry leadership in technology and innovation by powering the cloud platform in our manufacturing facilities,” said Anand Bahl, Chief Information Officer at Micron. “Nutanix’s secure, resilient, and scalable cloud platform allows us to modernise our manufacturing environment and move away from traditional compute and storage.”

The Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a consistent cloud operating model with a single platform for running applications and data across hybrid multicloud endpoints. Nutanix delivers resilience with self-healing nodes, persistent storage natively integrated to best support modern application deployments, performance and capacity scale linearly. Additionally, the Nutanix Cloud Platform can help deliver cost efficiencies by eliminating unused compute and storage resources.

Cloud Platforms, Cloud Providers, News

Alibaba Cloud Named a Leader Among FaaS Platform Providers

Function Compute received the highest scores across 26 out of the 40 ranking criteria in an independent research

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Functions-As-A-Service Platforms, Q2 2023.

The report states that Functions-As-A-Service (FaaS) platforms should deliver a “world-class developer experience, provide robust security capabilities and enable everyday use cases with enhanced workload portability.” Vendors in the Wave, including Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute were evaluated across 40 criteria grouped into three high-level categories – Current Offering, Strategy, and Market Presence. Alibaba obtained the highest score (4.43 out of 5.00) in the Current Offering category.

Key features of Function Compute were noted in the report, including its built-in visual autoscaling configuration capabilities, granular pricing models, user adoption strategy and emphasis on open source community support. Its ability to accommodate “web use cases, content-centric workloads and portability across hybrid environments” was also mentioned.

“As digitalisation deepens across the business world, the ability to seamlessly build serverless applications is only going to grow in importance. Our efforts to support the enterprises and developer community with a secure and flexible FaaS platform have, in our opinion, been recognised in this latest Forrester evaluation and we believe it reflects the progress we are making. We look forward to continuing to invest in our capabilities and innovate new ways to push the boundaries of our serverless product offerings,” said Jiangwei Jiang, Senior Researcher and General Manager of Infrastructure Products, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

 

Alibaba Cloud’s serverless computing platform Function Compute for highly simplified, scalable and efficient infrastructure 

Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service which alleviates users from managing their own infrastructure. Its secure and stable, pay-as-you-go platform is designed to simplify the computing experience to enable faster development and iteration of business logic and core code. The FaaS platform also scales and mobilises computing resources within milliseconds to handle spikes in online traffic, delivering reliable performance over time.

Function Compute has a proven track record across a variety of use cases, which include supporting online events, audio and video content, gaming and e-commerce, among others. One example is HEROZ, a Japanese artificial intelligence company providing solutions to a range of sectors, which was looking for a solution to lower its operations and maintenance (O&M) costs as well as better manage its peak and off-peak computing traffic periods. HEROZ adopted Function Compute to enhance its computing stability, improve the user experience while reducing churn, and lower its O&M costs.

 

Sampras (HK) Limited, Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong-based web development solutions partner, offers a wide range of services with an expertise in mobile platform and social media integrations. Together with Function Compute, Sampras products help businesses lower costs and optimise their support for e-commerce activity, covering flash sales, lotteries, and virtual queuing.

Alibaba Cloud recently introduced a 3-month free trial program of Function Compute. Global customers can try deploying their applications and services on Function Compute for serverless computing experience.

 

AI, Appointments, Cloud Providers, News

Aptum Strengthens Leadership Team with Key Appointments to Drive AI-Driven Multi-Cloud Market Growth  

  • Ian Rae assumes the role of CEO and President 
  • JP Rosato is appointed Chairman of the Board 
  • David Wigglesworth joins as Chief Revenue Officer 

  

Aptum, a global provider of Managed Services and Advisory & Consulting Services, today announced the appointment of Ian Rae as CEO and President of the company, JP Rosato as Chairman of the Board, and David Wigglesworth as Chief Revenue Officer. These strategic additions to the executive team are integral to Aptum’s vision to capitalise on the growing AI-driven demand of Multi-Cloud solutions in the market. 

Ian Rae assumes the role of CEO and President effective 1st September 2023, following Aptum’s successful acquisition of CloudOps in January 2023. He will succeed Susan Bowen, who, during her remarkable five-year tenure, expanded the company’s product offerings and transformed Aptum into a global Multi-Cloud Managed Services and Advisory & Consulting Services provider. 

A seasoned entrepreneur and technology visionary, Rae founded CloudOps in 2005, as well as cloud.ca, a leading Canadian cloud computing platform. He serves on the board of Air Transat and recently completed a board appointment with Genome Canada. He is actively involved as an advisor and angel investor in the Montréal, Québec, enterprise technology startup community. With his extensive expertise in cloud operations, software development, and managed services, Rae brings invaluable insights to his new leadership role. 

“In the last few months, I have had the privilege and honour to work alongside one of the best in the business,” said Rae. “Susan has built a world-class organisation with remarkable talent and a solid business plan, and I look forward to continuing to innovate and expand our comprehensive solution set. Aptum is well-positioned to offer true, end-to-end hybrid solutions for our global customers. I cannot wait to guide and grow the company as we enter an exciting chapter as a SuperCloud Managed Service Provider.” 

JP Rosato, Operating Partner at DigitalBridge, has been appointed Aptum’s new Chairman. With over 30 years of extensive design, engineering, and operations experience within large, complex technology environments, Rosato’s expertise will be instrumental in accelerating and driving Aptum’s business growth. He has played a pivotal role in developing innovative services, defining monetisation strategies for technology assets and investments, and establishing groundbreaking partnerships between enterprises and providers. 

Aptum is also thrilled to welcome David Wigglesworth as Chief Revenue Officer. With more than 25 years of experience in sales leadership, sales operations, demand generation, and territory development, Wigglesworth’s proven track record will be pivotal in leading the sales organisation across the US, Canada, Latin America, UK, and Europe. His expertise in SaaS, business continuity, storage, networking, cloud, and professional services will empower Aptum to provide superior solutions to its customers, helping them optimise workloads across hyperscale, regional, private, and edge cloud platforms. 

Wigglesworth’s most recent role was Senior VP of Global Sales at Panzura, and prior to that he held senior executive positions at Commvault, OVH, VMware, and EMC Corporation. 

About Aptum 

Aptum is a global provider of Managed Services and Advisory & Consulting Services, enabling customers to control and optimise workloads across multiple public and private clouds. The company helps customers “Own Your Destiny in the Cloud™” by solving complex technology challenges with comprehensive, outcome-based solutions. The Aptum approach is cloud platform-agnostic, empowering customers to improve performance and security of workloads; enable workload portability and optimisation; and drive greater flexibility and agility while lowering costs; all with unified management and reporting which span North America, Latin America, UK, and Europe. Aptum is a portfolio company of DigitalBridge, a global investment firm dedicated to strategic opportunities in digital infrastructure. For more information, visit www.aptum.com 

Cloud Providers, News, Tech

Alibaba Cloud Open-Sources Its 7-Billion-Parameter LLM Models, Strengthening Its Commitment to the Open-Source Community

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has announced its latest contribution to the open-source community by open-sourcing its 7-billion-parameter Large Language Models (LLM), Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, through its AI model community ModelScope, and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face.

Alibaba Cloud introduced its proprietary LLM, Tongyi Qianwen, earlier this year in April. This cutting-edge model, capable of generating human-like content in both Chinese and English, has different model sizes, including  seven billion and above parameters. This time, the open-source release includes the pre-trained 7-billion-parameter model, Qwen-7B, and its conversationally fine-tuned version, Qwen-7B-Chat.

In an effort to democratise AI technologies, the models’ code, model weights, and documentation will be freely accessible to academics, researchers and commercial institutions worldwide. For commercial uses, the models will be free to use for companies with fewer than 100 million monthly active users. Programs with more users can request a license from Alibaba Cloud.

“By open-sourcing our proprietary large language models, we aim to promote inclusive technologies and enable more developers and SMEs to reap the benefits of generative AI,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “As a determined long-term champion of open-source initiatives, we hope that this open approach can also bring collective wisdom to further help open-source communities thrive.”

The Qwen-7B was pre-trained on over 2 trillion tokens, including Chinese, English and other multilingual materials, code, and mathematics, covering general and professional fields. Its context length reaches 8K. In training, the Qwen-7B-Chat model was aligned with human instructions. Both Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat models can be deployed on cloud and on-premises infrastructures. This enables users to fine-tune the models and build their own high-quality generative models effectively and cost-efficiently.

The pre-trained Qwen-7B model distinguished itself in the Massive Multi-task Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, scoring a notable 56.7, outperforming other major pre-trained open-source models with similar scales or even some larger-size models. This benchmark assesses a text model’s multitask accuracy across 57 varied tasks, encompassing fields such as elementary mathematics, computer science and law. Moreover, Qwen-7B achieved the highest score among models with equivalent parameters in the leaderboard of C-Eval, a comprehensive Chinese evaluation suite for foundational models. It covers 52 subjects in four major specialities including humanities, social sciences, STEM and others. Additionally, Qwen-7B reached outstanding performance on benchmarks of mathematics and code generation, such as GSM8K and HumanEval.

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-7B model distinguished itself in several benchmarks

In July, Alibaba Cloud also introduced its AI image generator, Tongyi Wanxiang, which was designed to support developers and SMEs in their creative image expression. The cloud pioneer also unveiled ModelScopeGPT, a versatile framework designed to assist users in performing complex and specialised AI tasks across language, vision and speech domains by leveraging various AI models on ModelScope. Launched by Alibaba Cloud last year, ModelScope is an open-source AI model community currently featuring over 1,000 AI models contributed by 20 leading AI institutes.

For more information, please check out the details of Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat on ModelScope,Hugging Face and GitHub pages.

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About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.

Cloud Providers, News

Alibaba Cloud Upgrades AnalyticDB with Vector Database Engine as a One-Stop Solution for Building Generative AI Capabilities

Sector-specific AI-powered applications are made more accessible via cloud-native vector engine Upgraded One-stop, cloud-native data management and data serving platform for enhanced enterprise-level data management

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced an enhancement to its AnalyticDB vector engine, making it easier than ever for enterprises to access various large language models (LLMs) for building their customised generative AI capabilities. At its Data Management Summit hosted in Jakarta, Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its one-stop, cloud-native data management and data serving platform by introducing ApsaraDB HTAP (Hybrid Transactional & Analytical Processing), a dynamic solution that integrates cloud-native database PolarDB and cloud-native data warehouse AnalyticDB to provide comprehensive data processing and analysis capabilities to international customers.

Through an innovative integration framework, the AnalyticDB vector engine can connect with LLMs to deliver question answering features powered by the robust capabilities of LLMs. Enterprises can now input sector-specific knowledge into their vector databases, enabling them to build and launch generative AI applications in as little as 30 minutes. These customised AI models draw from each enterprise’s internal knowledge base to create content with specific enterprise details, enhancing operational efficiency and fostering innovation via business insights gleaned from efficiently and accurately retrieved data.

Building enterprise-specific generative AI models using fine-tuned training data can be a costly endeavour. However, the one-stop solution powered by AnalyticDB vector engine effectively lowers the financial and technical thresholds while offering strong cloud-native enterprise-level data protections through the Alibaba Cloud database management platform. AnalyticDB has already been utilised to support customers’ demand in scenarios such as text search and image search on e-commerce platforms with enhanced accuracy.

“As enterprises globally discern how best to adopt and use generative AI, we are seeing an increasing demand from our customers for database services that can support the creation of efficient, scalable, affordable and customisable AI models. With our upgraded AnalyticDB analytical database, enterprises can now leverage generative AI models that are tailored using their own knowledge base.” said Feifei Li, President of Database Products Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

One-stop, cloud-native data management and data serving platform upgraded to create more value for customers

At its Data Management Summit hosted in Jakarta, Alibaba Cloud also announced that ApsaraDB HTAP, a solution that integrates cloud-native databases PolarDB and AnalyticDB, is now available for international customers. ApsaraDB HTAP provides users with a unified platform that syncs the data from PolarDB’s transactional processing with AnalyticDB’s data analysis capabilities. This one-stop database management tool increases performance as well as provides extensive data processing capabilities that are highly elastic and cost effective. For example, by adopting the cloud-native HTAP solution, a customer from the gaming industry recently achieved performance increase by 100% with a cost reduction by 50%.

HTAP is a key technology improvement of the overall capability upgrade of PolarDB, Alibaba Cloud’s one-stop, cloud-native data management platform. With industry-leading technology features of serverless, three-tier decoupling, multi-master, and HTAP, the self-developed PolarDB help customers better manage and fully utilise their enterprise data.

“The trend of cloud-native, data fabric, integration, intelligent is driving the new wave of innovation for databases and has become the de facto standard of database industry. We look forward to further investing in our cloud-native database systems and finding new ways to help our customers grow amidst a rapidly changing business landscape,” said Feifei.

Alibaba Cloud is launching a database free trial program for the international customers to try out ten database products, including PolarDB, AnalyticDB RDS, Redis, among others. This portfolio of solutions covers backup, restoration, monitoring and migration, all designed to facilitate effective database management.

Driving the success of over 150,000 enterprise customers worldwide

Alibaba Cloud’s database product offerings support an exceptional amount of business activity worldwide and across a wide range of industries, including insurance, logistics, fintech, retail, education, manufacturing, gaming and more. Alibaba Cloud was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) for the third consecutive year in 2022.

“The acceleration of global digitalisation has been a key driver of demand for cloud-native database services, and we’ve been working hard to ensure our customers have the solutions they need to thrive. From increasing access to cutting edge technologies and capabilities to working with customers to leverage their data intelligence effectively, the market for database solutions is only set to grow and we’re excited to be supporting businesses to capture the resulting opportunities.” said Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

DOKU is one of Indonesia’s leading payment technology companies serving more than 150,000 merchants and more than five million e-wallet users in the country. DOKU looks for reliable, secure, scalable and cost-effective cloud computing services and has deployed a series of Alibaba Cloud products ranging from elastic compute service, network, to database. By adopting Alibaba Cloud database products including PolarDB and ApsaraDB RDS for Redis, Doku benefited from increased stability and the built-in high-availability option. The solutions freed the company’s personnel from many typical database management activities and helped implement a robust disaster recovery strategy.

Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), headquartered in Hong Kong and one of the world’s largest commercial Chinese TV program producers, used Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB to enhance their data management and help scale their services as viewership increased. Notably, PolarDB’s rapid elasticity and large volume storage capacity supported automatic scaling during viewer traffic peaks, while PolarDB ability to sync data allowed TVB to engage in real-time data analysis to improve decision-making.

enish Inc, a mobile game development company in Japan, leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s database solutions to enhance their business insights and game development journey. Alibaba Cloud’s data transmission and PolarDB offerings were combined with AnalyticDB to enable real-time analysis that helped developers enhance the player experience. A test environment for a new game was built in just 10 days, which was half the time it took previously. Moreover, the average data processing time was reduced by 50% while server costs were lowered by 30%.

Presto, Malaysia’s largest loyalty e-commerce redemption app adopted Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB, a cloud-native relational database to power its next phase of growth while maintaining cost efficiency, witnessing over 30% cost optimisation after the data migration according to the company. Following the successful database migration in the year 2020, Presto has since moved its e-commerce platform to Alibaba Cloud and is in the midst of migrating its entire IT system to Alibaba Cloud.

So Funny Company, a gaming studio with more than 200 million users globally and the developer of the popular games “Sausage Man” and “Idle Adventurers”, used Alibaba Cloud PolarDB to fulfill its requirement for automatic scaling, high availability, and high reliability to provide seamless experience for users. PolarDB helps So Funny Company significantly shortened maintenance time during game upgrades and server restart scenarios.

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About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.

Cloud Providers, News

11:11 Systems Expands Relationship with AWS to Extend Market Leading Data Protection Services Globally

Enhanced relationship provides customers with more choices, including new global access to 11:11 Services and the ability to standardise data protection across hybrid environments

11:11 Systems (“11:11”), a managed infrastructure solutions provider, today announced that it has expanded its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by joining the AWS Partner Network (APN) and will offer customers holistic data protection strategies that include additional Veeam Software solutions on AWS. The APN is a global community of AWS Partners that leverage programs, expertise, and resources to build, market and sell customer offerings.

“Extending our data protection services globally is the logical next step towards our mission to ensure that our customers’ networks and infrastructure are always running, accessible and protected,” said Brett Diamond, CEO, 11:11 Systems. “Expanding our relationship with AWS allows us to quickly deploy our award-winning data protection services to the geographies where our customers are doing business and across their entire IT portfolio, including their current and future cloud environments. This results in greater protection for our customers in an increasingly hostile cyber-security landscape.”

According to Gartner, the total projected worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will reach a record $597.3 billion in 2023.*

11:11 Systems is a seven-time winner of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) Impact Partner of the Year award for North America.

“11:11 Systems’ reputation among customers—which is enhanced by its recent acquisitions of the Sungard AS’ Recovery and Cloud Managed Services businesses and iland–- is renowned,” said Matt Kalmenson, vice president of Global Cloud and Service Providers, Veeam®. “The Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report 2023 shows that 98% of organisations utilise a cloud-hosted infrastructure as part of their data protection and ransomware recovery strategy and this expanded relationship offers customers unlimited flexibility in executing against that strategy.”

The industry-leading combination of 11:11 Systems and Veeam technology offers customers comprehensive solutions and enhanced expertise to address escalating cyberattacks and protect their data, no matter where it lives. These solutions include:

*Gartner Press Release, Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Reach Nearly $600 Billion in 2023, April 19, 2023 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-04-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-reach-nearly-600-billion-in-2023 Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

ABOUT 11:11 SYSTEMS

11:11 Systems is a managed infrastructure solutions provider that holistically addresses the challenges of next-generation managed cloud, connectivity and security requirements. The 11:11 model empowers customers and partners to “Rethink Connected,” which includes integrated services that deliver increased performance, optimisation and savings. Learn more at 1111Systems.com.

Cloud Providers, News

Cohesity Expands Partnerships with Cisco and HPE to Grow Market Penetration of Its Cloud Services

Cohesity today announced Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will each be offering Cohesity Cloud Services (CCS) to bring efficient data security and management to companies operating in today’s modern hybrid and multicloud environments.

Cohesity has benefited from strategic partnerships with Cisco and HPE to help deliver the benefits of the Cohesity Data Cloud to nearly 1,000 joint customers worldwide. In 2017, both companies started working with Cohesity to deliver integrated data protection solutions on Cisco UCS servers and HPE ProLiant and HPE Apollo servers respectively that dramatically simplify data management, harden cyber resilience, and help organisations recover their business operations rapidly in the event of a successful cyber-attack or disaster.

Today, Cohesity and Cisco have over 460 joint customers. Two recent examples of customers that have deployed FortKnox – Cohesity’s new award-winning cyber vaulting service – include the Master Group and Pearl River Community College. HPE and Cohesity have jointly helped over 600 customers including Citizen Potawatomi Nation and Proliance Surgeons, to move to a modern platform that simplifies data security and management, helping them improve their cyber resilience.

“There is always a desire to do more with less in IT, and it is our job to find the best solutions in terms of agility, security, cost, and efficiency to meet our organisation’s goals,” said George Ciarrocchi, executive director of Systems and Networking, Information Technology, Millersville University. “Cohesity has been a great partner in providing the flexibility we need to help us take advantage of a hybrid, multicloud model, while meeting our data security and management needs as well as our cost savings goals.”

“We are constantly working to improve the flexibility, cyber resilience, and simplify the operations of our systems,” said Curt Kwak, chief information officer, Proliance Surgeons. “Cohesity has been a great partner in offering data security and management solutions that provide the flexibility we need to meet our changing needs while helping us strengthen our cyber resilience and reduce complexity.”

Every day, organisations are under threat from cyber criminals, hackers, and nation states all while struggling with the complexities of managing data across hybrid, on-premises, and multicloud environments. Research indicates that 89% of data is stored in hybrid or cloud storage distributed globally,* resulting in increased security risks and operational complexity for organisations.

Cohesity Cloud Services are a portfolio of data security and management offerings, in which the cloud components are fully managed by Cohesity and hosted in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This SaaS approach simplifies the management of multiple data workflows. It provides backup and recovery, cyber vaulting and data isolation, automated disaster recovery, and threat defence as a service, on a single platform. This simplification enables IT teams to re-focus their time on more critical business requirements versus managing on-prem infrastructure, helping to increase IT productivity and morale, and business agility.

Cohesity Cloud Services – Accelerating Growth, Innovation, and Industry Recognition

CIOs and CISOs are under pressure to control costs and increase cyber resilience while facing increasing threats of cyber attacks and meeting stringent compliance requirements. As a result, they seek solutions that help to move from legacy to modern hybrid, multicloud models while improving the organisation’s security posture and ability to rapidly recover from a cyber-attack.

Cohesity has seen great success as a trusted vendor for enterprises worldwide and has experienced strong growth in its cloud services business. One in five customers now use Cohesity Cloud Services, and approximately 25% of all new customer and expansion business comes from CCS. In addition, nearly two thirds of CCS Annual Recurring Revenue in the past four quarters have come from enterprise customers with revenue greater than $1B, demonstrating strong interest from large customers.

The company has continued its rapid pace of innovation with the release of the award-winning, SaaS-based cyber vaulting solution, FortKnox and DataHawk, a new service that helps customers protect, detect, and recover from cyber and ransomware attacks. Cohesity recently expanded the availability of its cloud services beyond America, Canada and Europe to new regions around the world, including Singapore and Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Middle East.

“Enterprises are moving away from incumbent technologies to modern platforms for greater risk reduction, an improved security posture, and the ability to restore their systems quickly in the event of a cyber attack,” said Chris Kent, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, Cohesity. “We are partner-focused, and these agreements add significant resources to our ability to reach even more customers worldwide, as we continue to innovate and develop efficient, and simple solutions to secure and manage data, wherever it resides.”

“With more applications generating more data than ever before, customers face increased complexity and cost as they look to secure and manage their data while also improving cyber resilience and recovery,” said Jeremy Foster, SVP and General Manager, Cisco Compute. “To address these challenges, we are excited to bring simpler, cost-effective solutions to our customers with Cohesity Cloud Services.”

Cohesity Cloud Services are available today from Cohesity, HPE and HPE resellers. They will be available from Cisco and their channel partners in calendar 2023.

Africa, AI, Cloud Providers, News, Tech, Training

CloudSmiths to offer tailor-made generative AI workshops

The South-African based cloud provider to offer custom-tailored private sessions for businesses’ generative AI needs 

CloudSmiths, Africa’s most accredited Google Cloud Partner and top Salesforce Cloud Reseller, has announced the launch of its free generative AI workshops. Each workshop will be a custom-tailored, private session unique to the businesses’ specific challenges.

With the rise of GenAI, businesses need to be looking at how they can best harness the benefits that AI has to offer. Education and training are needed to help businesses navigate through these challenges. CloudSmiths has designed the workshops to help businesses prepare for the future of work and leadership in an AI-driven environment.

These in-person and bespoke designed workshops will focus on each business’s unique environment, industry landscape and distinct challenges. In addition to receiving a comprehensive GenAI action plan, the session will also empower you and your team to:

  • Identify opportunities for GenAI
  • Make smarter procurement decisions
  • Lead with confidence in the GenAI era and
  • Safeguard your transition and mitigate risks

On the launch of these workshops, Tom Fowler, CTO at CloudSmiths comments: “These workshops have been designed with a focus on your unique businesses environments, industry landscape, and distinct challenges. This insight informs our approach, enabling us to propose generative AI solutions that are relevant and worthwhile for your business. Our workshops focus on identifying critical AI use cases within your industry to help guide you toward optimal AI strategies.”

To book your free generative AI workshop, register here: http://gen-ai-workshop.com/