Amazon had two important announcements in the cloud and managed services space this week. The Web giant is not only leading the way in the cloud infrastructure services market, but is also rolling out new offerings through Amazon Web Services (AWS).
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon dominates the cloud infrastructure services market, comprising 36 percent of revenue within the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment. Total cloud infrastructure services revenue grew 15 percent from Q4 2011 and Q4 2012, reaching $12.5 billing according to Synergy. Revenue from IaaS and PaaS was greater than $2.75 billion in the first half of the year, growing 65 percent from that period in 2011.
Amazon is also catching up to Salesforce's 19-percent market share in the PaaS segment, according to the new data.
AWS also announced it is enabling its virtual private cloud (VPC) instance for new and existing AWS EC2 customers, thus advancing within the enterprise market. The company will enable the feature in the Asia Pacific and South America regions first, within the next several weeks. Instances will automatically launch into the "EC2-VPC" platform, with new features including DNS hostnames, DNS name resolution and RDS IP addresses.
The future is also bright for cloud spending in Saudi Arabia, with IDC predicting a 50-percent growth rate per year within the kingdom through 2016. While Saudi Arabian IT staff is still in the early stages of cloud implementation, they are learning about the benefits and figuring out a practical way to implement cloud services.
Fixed and wireless broadband has been growing within the kingdom, although there are still a small number of cloud providers.
Orange Business Services had a major announcement in the cloud space this week as well. The company migrated to a cloud-based secure authentication service from SafeNet to enhance its Security-as-a-Service portfolio. Orange is now providing enterprise customers with an additional layer of security for accessing corporate resources or cloud services using SafeNet's Authentication Service.
Customers may use multi-factor authentication within a cloud delivery model, thanks to the partnership with SafeNet.
Hybrid hosting and data center solutions provider, CentriLogic, acquired managed service provider (MSP), The Capris Group, this week. The managed hosting and IT services business of the Canadian MSP will integrate with CentriLogic's global data center solutions. The acquisition will create a new business unit focused on delivering application and platform management services to new and prospective customers.
CentriLogic also plans to add additional data center and disaster recovery space to its infrastructure footprint in the Greater Toronto area.
