Industry Insight: AT&T’s Alliances with Microsoft and IBM/Red Hat – A Tale of Two Clouds?

July has been a watershed month for AT&T as it enters into two major “cloud deals”, one with Microsoft and another with the newly merged IBM and Red Hat. At first glance, the two deals seem oddly contradictory – a collision of proprietary Microsoft cloud (although about half of Azure workloads run on top of Linux) with open source cloud from the combined IBM and Red Hat. But why two cloud deals? What makes them different? What does it mean for the companies involved?

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?