Welcome to The Cloud 5, our weekly feature where we scour the web searching for the five most intriguing and poignant cloud links we can find.
Before we jump into this week’s links, please have a look at one of our recent blog posts, IBM introduces skinny mainframe for cloud age. IBM introduced a new slimmer mainframe this week designed specifically for cloud data centers.
And without further delay, here we go with this week’s links:
In a Slack world, Microsoft bets on Teams and Yammer | TechCrunch
Slack has very quickly grown to be the communications darling of the enterprise, but don’t expect Microsoft to just roll over and cede the space to them. Using a combination of first generation Enterprise 2.0 in Yammer and a more modern Teams, they are ready to take them on.
Amazon files under-radar protest with multibillion-dollar contract on the line | Business Insider
You would expect everyone to be going after Amazon when it comes to cloud contracts, especially lucrative ones with U.S. government, but Amazon isn’t sitting still, while other companies score big government deals either. It has filed a protest against Google’s award of a $25 million contract with West Point.
Oracle’s Safra Catz raises Amazon contract fight with Trump | Bloomberg
Meanwhile, Oracle, which probably has very little chance to score the winner-take-all Pentagon cloud contract is trying a little protesting of its own. Bloomberg reports that co-CEO Safra Catz met with the president last week to be sure Oracle was treated fairly in the contract selection proceedings.
Amazon’s cloud business is still in a league of its own (sorry, Microsoft and Google) | The Street
In case you maybe thought something changed in the cloud market, it’s still Amazon’s world. Everyone else is just fighting over second place, and the combined market share of the next four combined is still not equal to Amazon’s, even after all this time.
Gartner: Global IT spending to grow 6.2% in 2018 | Gigabit Magazine
Gartner came out with its yearly spending predictions, and while you can use them as a benchmark of sorts, it’s important to take these numbers with a grain of salt. One thing is likely certain though — and that’s that cloud spending is probably going to pick up.
Photo Credit: Tomma Henckel. Used under CC 2.0 license.
