Industry Insight: Microsoft’s Flight to the Hyper-converged Edge Cloud

In the last three months, Microsoft has been on a tear building out its portfolio of 5G core and virtualized network service management technologies having acquired Affirmed Networks, and most recently, Metaswitch. The acquisition of these telecom tech companies by the leading enterprise IT technology company and cloud service provider may seem curious at first, but these transactions highlight the acceleration of a transformative trend that we at neXt Curve dubbed Under-the-Bottom (UTB) in our 2019 technology horizon study for Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s communications and media sector regulator.

The Fight for 5G Superiority will be Fought in The Cloud

Since the term “Cloud Computing” was coined, CSPs (Communications Service Providers) have had a tremendous challenge developing viable cloud capabilities and offerings for their enterprise clients that compete with emerging digital infrastructure players such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.  With 5G on the horizon it is ever more critical that traditional telco operators find their cloud mojo lest current cloud leaders and new intermediary entrants make a move to the middle to take the great 5G promise away from them.

Industry Insight: IBM+Red Hat, The Great Cloud Brokerage Play

It’s official, IBM will now become the biggest Cloud broker play in the ICT universe with its acquisition of Red Hat for a whopping $34 billion in cash. It seems only yesterday that neXt Curve sat down with IBM to discuss the future of cloud and the future is the hybrid cloud. The cloud landscape is poised to change as cloud brokerage models are poised inject transparency (economic and service quality) and portability of workloads into enterprise cloud strategies. Are the walled public cloud gardens about to come down? 

The Hybrid Cloud Bill of Rights

The cloud landscape continues to change and evolve. Our current assumptions about cloud and how it will influence IT and our IT investments will need to evolve as well.  When you consider the fluidity of the cloud vendor landscape, it is important to consider price/performance market intelligence to make the best decisions for your cloud strategy – your hybrid cloud strategy. 

The Future of Cloud: The Cloud Continuum

Cloud of yesterday is not Cloud as we know it today.  The computing model continues to evolve and virtualized enterprise data centers converge with public cloud service in creating the emerging frontier of hybrid computing.  Where is cloud computing going and what is next?