Top of the list of executives bursting onto the scene in June, our ‘Cloud Bursters’ #1, was Mark Reuss, President of General Motors, who has been talking about making the computer systems in the firm’s new cars’ cloud-based (see the June Top 50 individual rankings where Mark came 5th).
Next came Scott Guthrie, the man who who runs Azure, commenting that he sees the cloud market becoming a three-horse race (with Google as the third pony). “I give [AWS] credit for pushing the cloud earlier than others,” Guthrie said, “but I don’t think this is a market that’s winner take all.” He believes that Microsoft and Google are also doing something that’s familiar to any retailer who has ever competed with Amazon.com: They’re engaging the incumbent in a price war.
Commenting on another war, SoundCloud chief executive Alexander Ljung welcomed the arrival of Apple Music saying that its launch will only benefit his music streaming service. Speaking to Music Business Worldwide, Ljung maintained that he was not concerned about Apple Music having an adverse effect on SoundCloud because he doesn’t “see anything out there that’s remotely close to SoundCloud”. Lets see how these wars play out for all involved.
In the June Top 50 individual rankings we focused on Larry and the Oracle cloud love in, as they launched Oracle Commerce Cloud. Keith Hurley, Director of Spindrift (a DigitasLBI Company) was one of the Oracle partners rolled out to add independent adulation to that from Oracle. He claimed that: “With Oracle Commerce Cloud we can now deliver the core commerce components of our customer implementations and also serve as the design agency for the broader customer experience.”
Also part of the Oracle cloud love in was Ken Volpe, Senior Vice President, product development, Oracle, who added that Commerce Cloud is a new, differentiating piece of the broader Oracle CX cloud applications portfolio and helps ensure online businesses no longer have to worry about deploying code, upgrading, and managing day-to-day infrastructure. So there we have it.
Focusing on the importance of security standards for the cloud security ecosystem, Jim Reavis , CEO of the CSA, commented that the right set of working definitions can boost adoption.
Returning to the bette front, Jim Weins, vice president of marketing at Rightscale, a service that helps developers manage cloud services, estimates that AWS customers now pay half as much for the same services as they did at the beginning of 2013 and that Google’s prices have fallen 62% over the same period.
Meanwhile in India, Sivarama Krishnan, Director of PwC’s Risk Advisory business endorsed the government’s new privacy and data sovereignty policy, saying: ”The government’s locker is more secure primarily because the data gets stored within India and you are protected under the Information Technology Act, 2000. If you store anything in DropBox or Google Drive, you are governed by US regulations.”
Conversely a more global approach was advocated by Jim Comfort, general manager of cloud services for IBM: “Our global network of IBM Cloud data centre locations, along with on-the-ground expertise, will provide customers with the best support and the most reliable availability, security and performance for their local and worldwide business transactions,” he said.
Rounding out the top ten was Jim Cole, SVP of Outsourcing Services at Hitachi Consulting who believes that he has the answer for companies wanting to extend private cloud environments to include a public, hosted platform for non-mission-critical workloads.
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Topping the UK rankings for June was Windstream VP of data center marketing Rob Carter who believes that their Elastic Hybrid Cloud truly creates an elastic environment, leveraging the best of public and private cloud worlds. This means that for the second month running IBM’s prolific Simon Porter was pipped to top spot by a single point.
In 3rd was Angus MacSween, iomart’s CEO commenting on the increasing complexity and demand for public cloud services. Their acquisition of SystemsUp, he argues has broadened iomart’s ability to engage at a strategic level and act as a trusted advisor on cloud strategy to organisations wanting to create the right blend of cloud services. He came just ahead of John Jackson, from Camden Council, last months’ leader n the rankings.
Rob Fraser, CTO for cloud services Microsoft UK, claimed that in cost of compute or storage, open cloud is hard to beat, while Maarten Ectors of Cannonical Group argued that the Snappy Ubuntu Core on top of Acer’s products would enable developers to let their imagination run free, and Simon Hansford from Skyscape Cloud Services welcomed a partnership with DeepSecure for secure digital services to the UK public sector.
Finally we had Emma King from CA Technologies and Jim Liddle from Storage Made Easy who succeeded in pushing our very own Neil Cattermull down to 11th this month.
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NOTE: the Compare the Cloud #CloudInfluence league tables, are based on a broad big data analysis of all major global news, blogs, forums, and social media interaction over the past 90 days. The league tables provide a snapshot taken at a particular point of time of the respective influence of both organisations and individuals over the last quarter. Companies that were particularly active in the given period will feature more prominently.
Bill is a tech industry veteran and experienced corporate marketing and communications professional with over 20 years spent working in blue chip organisations mostly in pan-European and global communications roles. He is also a regular commentator on #Cloud, #SocialSelling and #InfluencerMarketing, as well as a dad with a passion for technology, economics, politics & Arsenal FC.
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