CRN's biggest cloud stories of 2019

2019 has been a huge year for cloud computing, with many vendor announcements, partnerships, analyst predictions and even cloud outages. 

CRN compiled the biggest cloud-related news stories we reported in 2019, in the following slideshow. 

Click the navigation arrows on each photo or use the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll through our list.

Cloud infrastructure sales beat traditional IT last year

24 January

Revenue from cloud IT infrastructure sales outpaced traditional infrastructure sales for the first time in the third quarter of 2018, according to IDC.

The market analyst released its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, which showed that cloud infrastructure revenue grew by 47.2 percent in the third quarter last year, reaching US$16.8 billion.

Read the full story here.

Amazon Web Services earns approval to host 'Protected' government data

24 January

Amazon Web Services became the latest cloud provider to be approved to host highly sensitive data for the Australian government and its departments at the ‘Protected’ level in its Sydney region.

The certification allows cloud providers to offer their services to government agencies that require their data to be stored at ‘protected’ level and requires approval from the Australian Signals Directorate.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre certified 42 AWS services which covers compute, storage, network, database, security, analytics, application integration, management and governance.

Read the full story here.

Azure, Google Cloud close gap to AWS in global cloud market

5 February

Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud started to gain ground on public cloud market leader AWS, according to research from Canalys.

Azure's market share was at 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, up from 14 percent in the same period in 2017, while Google Cloud reached 9 percent share for the first time, up from 7.6 percent year-over-year.

Meanwhile AWS remained the market leader at 32 percent, unchanged from Q4 2017, while fourth place Alibaba Cloud also remains at 4 percent.

Read the full story here.

Australian managed cloud services market predicted to reach $2.8 billion in 2022

11 February

Research firm IDC predicted Australia’s managed cloud services market would reach close to $3 billion in 2022.

A report from the research firm predicted that the managed cloud services market will grow from $1.1 billion in 2017 to $2.86 billion in 2022, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 20 percent.

The growth is expected due to companies’ cloud strategies starting to include more critical workloads, resulting in more challenges associated in maintaining increasingly complex environments.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft expands Azure reserved instance discounts

12 February

Microsoft expanded its Azure Reserved Instances offer.

This matters because Reserved Instances (RIs) are the cheapest way to consume Azure: users pay up-front for either one or three years in return for discounts that drop prices well below pay-as-you-go pricing.

Microsoft pushes RIs hard and encourages its channel to do likewise (and also offers a pro-rata refund if users decide to bail).

Read the full story here.

VMware to recruit partners for AWS cloud push

18 March

VMware signalled a channel push for its AWS cloud offering, with twin job posts seeking “partner development managers”.

The ads, for roles in Sydney and Melbourne, said whoever scores the jobs would “recruit and activate new and dormant partners” and be measured on metrics including “Recruit new partners” and “Activating a VMware Cloud on AWS Practice with named key reseller and SISO partners”.

Read the full story here.

Google and VMware get closer in the cloud

27 March

Google extended a big fat olive branch to VMware users, by releasing a plugin for vRealize Automation.

The new plugin allows users to “build their own blueprints for Google Cloud resources such as VM instances, Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, and Cloud Storage buckets to publish to the vRA service catalog.” And do it all within vRealize Automation  (vRA), VMware’s cloud automation tool, while also being able to manage other clouds.

VMware was totally on board with this effort, praising it and hailing it as enabling the companies to be “better together”.

Read the full story here.

AWS drops cloud storage price to $2/terabyte/month

29 March

Amazon Web Services introduced a new tier of cloud storage that will store a terabyte of data for about $2.00 per month, or $0.002 a gigabyte.

You read that right. One terabyte. Two Australian dollars. Or about $1.40 if you store it in one of Amazon’s US data centres, where the price is just US$0.00099 per gigbayte.

The new tier is called “Glacier Deep Archive” and is aimed at data that’s “collected and immediately processed, then stored for years or decades just in case there’s a need for further processing or analysis.” AWS suggests financial services companies might fancy the service for long-term storage of transaction data, and that it’s a fine way to store security camera footage.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft announces new on-prem Azure options

27 March

Microsoft announced expanded hybrid cloud offerings, unveiling Azure Stack HCI solutions for customers that want to run virtualized applications on hyperconverged infrastructure, and signaling the general availability of Azure Data Box Edge and Dell EMC Tactical Microsoft Azure Stack.

“Customers who are taking a hybrid cloud approach are seeing real business value – I see this in organizations across the globe,” Julia White, Microsoft Azure’s corporate vice president, said in a blog post touting the new offerings. “The ability for customers to embrace both public cloud and local data center, plus edge capability, is enabling customers to improve their IT agility and maximize efficiency.”

Microsoft also announced the preview of Anomaly Detector, a new Azure Cognitive Services offering, and the availability of Azure Custom Vision.

Read the full story here.

HPE and Nutanix partner for hybrid cloud happiness

9 April

Nutanix added HPE to its collection of friendly clouds and server-makers.

The two announced that Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software will be available in two modes.

One is the same kind of deal Nutanix has with Dell and Lenovo – Nutanix software on an OEM’s servers. Nutanix and HPE haven’t done this officially before, but in the near future ProLiant and Apollo servers will be in the mix.

Read the full story here.

IBM buries its old clouds– they're all IBM Cloud now

14 April

IBM announced that it was effectively burying its old cloud brands.

Big Blue’s cloud branding has taken quite a few twists and turns in recent years. It started marketing IBM SmartCloud in 2012 but after it acquired Softlayer in 2013 pushed the second brand as its lead IaaS entity. But in 2014 it also started a PaaS service called Bluemix. IaaS and PaaS are complementary so in late 2016 IBM decided on a unified cloud platform of Softlayer and its PaaS platform Bluemix.

Meanwhile IBM also marketed “IBM Cloud”. So in October 2017 the company decided to rename Bluemix to “IBM Cloud”.

Read the full story here.

IBM opens Australian multi-zone availability region for cloud

30 April

IBM Australia’s new cloud boss Eric Schnatterly said the company’s multi-zone availability region (MZR) for cloud is now live in Sydney.

IBM announced plans to deploy an MZR in Australia last June.

Schnatterly will use his address at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies summit in Sydney tonight to officially launch the MZR, though he noted it had already been quietly set live.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft and VMware forge new cloud alliance

30 April

The long-rumored VMware-Microsoft cloud alliance became official as the two enterprise technology giants unveiled the contours of a joint solution that will natively bring VMware environments into the Azure cloud.

While the hybrid cloud offering unveiled at the Dell World conference in Las Vegas had been expected, the comprehensive road map for releasing integrated cloud services still stirred excitement in both Microsoft and VMware channels.

Azure VMware Solutions, the service to hit market later this year, will immediately compete with VMware Cloud on AWS.

Read the full story here.

AWS boss to Australia - make us work harder!

1 May

Amazon Web Services' ANZ lead Paul Migliorini called on the channel to make life challenging for the cloud leader.

Speaking with CRN at the AWS Partner Summit this week, Migliorini was accompanied by newly-appointed channel chief Corrie Briscoe and head of partner and ecosystems solution architecture Adrian De Luca to chat about all things cloud in Australia.

When asked about what he'd like to tell partners, Migliorini asked the channel to challenge AWS even more.

Read the full story here.

CRN poll: Cloud and SaaS are the hottest H2 opportunities

24 June

CRN’s poll asked what the readers consider the hottest sales opportunity for the second half of 2019.

And the winner, by the length of the proverbial strait, was “Anything cloud or SaaS”, which scored 37.5 percent of the vote.

Coming in dead last was the internet of things, at just four percent.

Read the full story here.

Australian businesses using more cloud than ever: ABS

26 June

Australian businesses used paid cloud services more than ever, but insufficient knowledge about cloud computing is still holding some back, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The ABS measured cloud use by Aussie businesses in 2017-18 as part of its Characteristics of Australian Businesses report.

The report found that 42 percent of businesses used some form of paid cloud computing across those two years, compared to 31 percent in 2015-16.

Read the full story here.

AWS scoops $39 million whole-of-govt procurement deal

27 June

Amazon Web Services signed a whole-of-government deal to help simplify cloud procurement for federal, state and territory agencies.

The initial deal was worth $39 million over the next three years.

The arrangement also extends to public universities and any other government-owned agency.

Read the full story here.

New Google Cloud partner program launches

1 July

Google Cloud’s revamped partner program and portal went live - including in Australia - with the intent of making it easier for partners to engage with the company and better highlight their expertise to customers.

The newly named Google Cloud Partner Advantage program consolidates 16 partner programs under one umbrella and will trigger Google Cloud’s first recruitment efforts to increase its partner ecosystem, according to Nina Harding, chief of global partner strategy and programs.

Read the full story here.

Australian cloud is 66 percent SaaS: IDC

4 July

Australia’s “cloud” market was mostly software-as-a-service, said analyst house IDC.

The firm’s new tracker of Australian cloud services revenue from 2016 to 2018 found that revenue in reached $4.01 billion in 2018, 30.6 percent year-on-year growth.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was 65.8 percent of that spend, ahead of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. The study also suggested that approximately 58 percent of Australian organisations have implemented a SaaS solution.

Read the full story here.

AWS creates competency for Microsoft migrations

15 July

The cloud wars continued as AWS announced a competency to validate independent software vendors' skills and experience in migrating customers’ Microsoft workloads to AWS.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft boosts incentives for Azure deals

19 July

Microsoft laid out its vision and priorities for the coming financial year, and in a colossal non-surprise they include a lot more incentives to use Azure.

The first is accelerating usage, which covers further incentives to push cloud consumption, namely Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, just case Microsoft hadn’t enough incentive yet.

Read the full story here.

Azure becomes Microsoft's biggest business

19 July

Growth of the Azure cloud platform led Microsoft's intelligent cloud segment to leapfrog both of its other businesses in its latest quarter—becoming the company's largest segment by revenue for the first time.

Microsoft's fiscal 2019 fourth quarter, ended June 30, “speaks to an inflection point in deal flow as more enterprises pick [Microsoft] for the cloud,” wrote Daniel Ives, managing director for equity research at Wedbush Securities, in a note to investors.

Read the full story here.

Google Cloud to start running VMware workloads

30 July

VMware and Google Cloud unveiled a new strategic relationship to support VMware workloads running on the Google Cloud Platform.

Read the full story here.

Oracle brings second-gen cloud to Australia

6 August

Oracle announced an upgrade to its Australian cloud.

The service delivers security by placing customer code, data, and resources on a bare metal computer, but cloud control code lives on a separate computer with a different architecture.

Oracle argues that without this sort of separation, cloud operators could peer at users’ data. Its cloud now also offers AI-and-ML tricks to detect threats, automated analytics and the Oracle Autonomous Database, and says that plus its isolation tech all adds up to superior security.

Read the full story here.

AWS launches new database certification program for partners

6 August

Amazon Web Services launched a new database certification to validate AWS partners’ expertise across the cloud computing provider’s relational and non-relational database offerings.

Read the full story here.

AWS unveils new End User Computing Competency

8 August

Amazon Web Services introduced a new End User Computing Competency for AWS Partner Network Consulting Partners.

The new competency was tailored for Advanced and Premier Consulting Partners that can document their ability to support customers that need to provision, protect and glean intelligence from endpoint devices, end-user applications and data on AWS’ cloud computing platform, according to Renata Melnyk, an AWS senior partner program manager.

Read the full story here.

CRN Poll – Channel doubts reality of multi-cloud

12 August

CRN’s regular reader poll asked “Is multi-cloud really happening?”

Readers were sceptical that customers are really interested in combinations of IaaS providers, but felt it could be more applicable to a mix of IaaS and SaaS. Or even multiple SaaS products.

Read the full story here.

AWS forbids partners even mentioning multi-cloud!

14 August

Amazon Web Services didn’t want partners to spill the beans that other clouds exist.

The hyperscale giant released a new co-branding guide, instructing partners in the AWS Partner Network (APN) how to position their marketing material when going to market with AWS.

Among the guidelines, AWS said it won’t approve the use of terms like “multi-cloud,” “cross cloud,” “any cloud,” “every cloud,” “or any other language that implies designing or supporting more than one cloud provider.”

Read the full story here.

Google Cloud exec uses CRN AU story to swipe AWS multi-cloud ban

16 August

Google Cloud’s lead sales executive took aim at Amazon Web Services' guide that forbids AWS partners from using “multi-cloud” or references to multiple cloud computing providers in their co-branded marketing materials.

As CRN Australia reported, AWS released its Co-Branding Guide for partners this week. The document provides guidelines for AWS Partner Network members doing approved joint marketing campaigns with AWS.

“AWS does not allow or approve use of the terms ‘multi-cloud,’ ‘cross cloud,’ ‘any cloud,’ ‘every cloud’ or any other language that implies designing or supporting more than one cloud provider,” the guide states. “In this same vein, AWS will also not approve references to multiple cloud providers (by name, logo, or generically).”

Read the full story here.

Microsoft makes major Azure price policy change

16 September

Microsoft made a major Azure price policy change by adding a monthly payment option for reserved instances, reversing a previous policy of charging up-front for the service.

It’s a significant change because Microsoft made reserved instances the cheapest way to pay for Azure: buyers were offered big discounts of up to 70 percent on as-you-go pricing if they paid up-front prices for either one or three years of services like SQL server, IaaS, or Windows and Linux VMs.

Read the full story here.

Oracle Cloud becomes reseller for third-party software

17 September

Oracle added the ability to handle billing for third-party software to its cloud marketplace and become member of the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP).

Joining VCPP means that VMware’s Cloud Foundation will run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, making it possible to run a hybrid cloud that spans on-prem and Oracle-hosted VMware software. The deal spans a full stack software-defined data center (SDDC) including VMware vSphere, NSX, and vSAN.

The deal will also see Oracle “provide technical support for Oracle software running in VMware environments both in customer on-premise data centers and Oracle-certified cloud environments.”

Read the full story here.

Google Cloud adds managed service mesh, serverless to Anthos

17 September

Google Cloud added new managed service mesh and serverless capabilities for Anthos, its hybrid and multi-cloud platform introduced in April.

Anthos Service Mesh connects, manages and secures microservices when using Anthos, which lets customers run their applications on-premises or in the public cloud, including rivals Amazon Web Services’ and Microsoft Azure’s clouds in addition to Google Cloud. Cloud Run for Anthos allows customers to run stateless workloads on a fully managed Anthos environment.

Read the full story here.

AWS brings 60TB flash instances to Australia

19 September

AWS brought a new EC2 instance type to Australia, and it’s a monster.

The EC2 I3en instance type runs a Skylake Xeon at up to 3.1GHz, plus up to 100 Gbps networking bandwidth, 96 vCPUs, and 768 GiB of RAM.

But the headline act is storage, which goes from 1.25TB of low-latency NVMe to 60 terabytes, all of it capable of up to 2 million random IOPS at 4 KB block sizes and up to 16 GB/s of sequential disk throughput.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft refreshes Dynamics 365

24 September

Microsoft debuted new Dynamics 365 applications to help companies improve their online and brick-and-mortar retail businesses and rolled out other apps and features adding artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to the cloud-based, business management software platform.  

Launched in 2016, Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and productivity applications.

“The common thread in our customers’ success is the power of a comprehensive, connected business cloud, drawing on unified data and applied intelligence to help customers make proactive decisions to positively impact their business,” Alysa Taylor, corporate vice president of Microsoft business applications and global industry, said in a blog post announcing the Dynamics 365 additions. “Customers have seen a transformative shift from a siloed to a proactive way of doing business.”

Read the full story here.

AWS, Microsoft and Google lead for IaaS and PaaS revenue

30 September

Cloud service revenues were growing much more rapidly than spending on cloud infrastructure, a positive signal that the market is in a high-growth phase, and financials are improving, according to a new report.

The cloud is increasingly dominating the information technology (IT) landscape, and cloud-associated markets are growing at rates of 10 percent to well more than 40 percent, according to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy, a market intelligence and analytics firm.

Read the full story here.

AWS Q3 revenue hits US$9b despite slower growth rate

25 October

Amazon continued to cash in on cloud. The Seattle-based tech titan said revenue from its cloud computing unit rose 35 percent to US$9 billion during its most recent quarter -- but below the growth rate in recent quarters.

The growth rate for Amazon Web Services is below the previous quarter’s rate of 37 percent and significantly below the 46 percent growth rate from the same quarter a year before.

Read the full story here.

AWS vastly expands its own managed services

25 October

AWS increased the managed services options for its customers by adding 29 new services to its AWS Managed Services (AMS) program.

AMS “automates common activities, such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services, and provides full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support your infrastructure.” The cloud colossus says that by doing so it “unburdens you from infrastructure operations so you can direct resources toward differentiating your business.”

Critically, the service offers “a fully staffed service desk available to answer questions, resolve incidents and perform and manage complex change requests.” That service desk is run by “full time Amazon employees” who work “24x7 365 days a year to augment and empower your team to accelerate your cloud operations.”

Read the full story here.

Microsoft beats Amazon to US$10B JEDI cloud deal

27 October

The U.S. Department of Defense said it chose Microsoft over Amazon for a giant cloud computing contract worth up to US$10 billion.

The contract, known as JEDI and worth up to $10 billion, was the subject of much controversy and a major lawsuit by Oracle, which accused the Pentagon of favoring Amazon Web Services in the procurement process.

The Pentagon heralded the contract award as a “step forward” in its cloud strategy.

Read the full story here.

Azure prices to change every month as $US pricing commences

28 October

The price of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services started to change every month, thanks to Microsoft’s decision to move to a single price list in US dollars but bill in local currency.

Microsoft announced the change to US dollars when revealing the refresh of its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program in June 2019.

Those changes kick in on Friday, 1 November, for new purchases. Current customers will be migrated to the new arrangement over a year.

Read the full story here.

Clouds need the channel more than ever: Canalys

31 October

The channel became a new catalyst for the continued growth of major cloud providers as customers start to adopt multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments.

Research from Canalys revealed that cloud providers are “reaching a critical point” in their growth strategies amid the popularity of multi-cloud and hybrid IT models, with some either exploring application-specific functionality or investing in more than one provider to spread risk.

Read the full story here.

Google lets channel resell Anthos hybrid cloud

7 November

Google Cloud revved up its Anthos hybrid and multi-cloud sales offensive with a new channel charge.

The up-and-coming cloud provider has authorized 50 partners to start reselling Anthos in early 2020, Carolee Gearhart, Google’s global channel chief and vice president of worldwide channel sales, told CRN.

“It’s part of our ongoing commitment to the channel,” she said.

Read the full story here.

MSPs must master multi-cloud says IDC

11 November

Analyst firm IDC offered some guidance to cloud-centric managed services providers (MSPs), and the guts of it is to master multi-cloud or risk irrelevance as buyers sprawl across clouds at the same time they look to reduce the number of service providers with which they engage.

That conclusion was offered in the analyst firm’s new worldwide Managed CloudView 2019 study which surveyed 1,500 organisations with 1,000 or more employees whether or not they use MSPs.

Read the full story here.

Salesforce taps Microsoft Azure for Marketing Cloud

15 November

Salesforce chose Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for its Salesforce Marketing Cloud and announced a new integration to connect the Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds with Microsoft Teams.

To date, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud has primarily run on the company’s own infrastructure, according to a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based, cloud computing software-as-a-service company, which specializes in customer relationship management (CRM).

Read the full story here.

AWS challenges Microsoft’s JEDI Cloud win

18 November

Amazon Web Services appealed the U.S. Department of Defense’s decision last month to award the massive Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract to rival Microsoft as part of its digital modernisation strategy for the military.

AWS confirmed it filed a notice with the US Court of Federal Claims of its intent to protest the Microsoft award, which was viewed as a major upset for No. 1-ranked AWS by its closest public cloud competitor. Both were finalists for the general-purpose cloud contract, which potentially is worth up to US$10 billion over 10 years.

In a statement, AWS alluded to political pressure from the White House playing a role in the DoD decision.

Read the full story here.

Google Cloud unveils new security capabilities

21 November

Google Cloud took the wraps off new data encryption, network security, security analytics and user protection capabilities today in London for the kickoff of its Next ’19 UK conference expected to draw 7000 attendees as its largest customer event in Europe.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft partners upset by floating Azure price plan

26 November

Microsoft partners are far from comfortable with the company’s decision to price Azure in US dollars, and let local prices move with the exchange rate.

The new pricing scheme kicked off on November 1st when Microsoft launched its new Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.

Read the full story here.

AWS goes on quantum computing offensive

3 December

Amazon Web Services rolled out Amazon Braket, a new quantum computing service for scientists, researchers and developers to experiment with quantum computing hardware from industry providers including D-Wave Systems, IonQ and Rigetti Computing.

The cloud computing giant also established the AWS Center for Quantum Computing to accelerate the development of quantum computing technologies and applications, along with a new AWS Quantum Solutions Lab.

The announcements came on the first day of the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference for partners and customers in Las Vegas.

Read the full story here.

Amazon Web Services launches on-prem Outposts

4 December

Amazon Web Services released its on-premises alternative AWS Outposts for general availability at its re:Invent conference.

AWS Outposts are compute and storage racks allowing customers to host and run their applications and workloads on-prem while tapping into services from Amazon’s public cloud, including EC2, EBS, Elastic Containers, Elastic Kubernetes, Relational Database Services and more.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft adds new Azure pricing tier with spot VMs

10 December

Microsoft started a preview of a new way to consume Azure.

Known as “Azure Spot Virtual Machines”, the new offer can see prices for Azure VMs sink 90 percent below list prices for pay-as-you-go servers. The kicker is that prices are variable and Microsoft reserves the right to terminate VMs with 30 seconds notice. And yes, we do mean seconds, not minutes.

The rapid termination is due to the fact that Spot Virtual Machines are served from unused Azure capacity. If another customer willing to pay more or with a better claim to Azure resources wants resources, they get them and Spot VM users get to find somewhere else to run their workloads.

Read the full story here.

AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM disclose cloud outages

Cloud providers had their own share of outages, ranging from a few minutes to multiple days, caused by a variety of reasons.

Here are some of the outages we reported over the course of 2019:

5 April - IBM's cloud data management system goes down again...and again...and again!

16 April - IBM admits its own errors led to multiple cloud crashes

3 May - AWS EC2 Sydney wobbles – for the first time in 1059 days

3 May - Azure outage turns off Australia, Office 365, and more

3 June - Google Cloud in worldwide wobble, G Suite, YouTube affected

5 June - Google Cloud hit by new networking-related outage

6 June - IBM Cloud suffers multiple issues with running apps, provisioning

18 June - IBM cloud outage: API and portal disappear for an hour

20 November - Microsoft 365 outage strikes, lasts about four hours

20 November - Microsoft blames networking build for 365 outage

22 November - Australia cops third Microsoft cloud outage in a week

27 November - AWS Australia servers wobble