Amazon’s fifth cloud computing conference, AWS re:Invent, begins this week in Las Vegas, showcasing the impact of Amazon Web Services on corporate information technology. About 32,000 people are expected to attend. In the five years since its debut, AWS has offered a more price-conscious, subscription services-based alternative to on-site servers, storage, networking and software. As a result, Amazon’s AWS has grown 55 percent in Q3 to $3.2 billion, due in part to some large companies that recently came on board. Continue reading Amazon Expands Cloud Offerings, Big Firms Sign On to AWS

Amazon Game Studios recently unveiled its first big-budget video game, the multiplayer online battle game “Breakaway,” described as street basketball played in a mythological world where athletes are armed. With the game, Amazon integrates live streaming app Twitch, which it bought for nearly $1 billion, and also incorporates Lumberyard, its cross-platform, 3D game engine. Lumberyard, free to game developers, connects to its Amazon Web Services cloud storage. The game is available for free, indefinitely, as Amazon works out the bugs. Continue reading Amazon’s New ‘Breakaway’ Integrates Twitch and AWS Cloud

Major American tech companies are building multiple data centers in Europe, with the end goal of dominating the cloud computing market there. The leading provider, Amazon Web Services, will soon open data centers in France and Britain. The second largest cloud computing provider, Microsoft reports it has spent $1 billion in the last year on data centers, for a total expenditure of $3 billion since 2005. Google, already in Belgium and Finland, will complete a new expansive data center in the Netherlands by the end of 2016. Continue reading U.S. Cloud Computing Titans Invest in European Data Centers

Digital media center manufacturer Plex is debuting Plex Cloud, which runs its server on Amazon Drive without a local computer or network-attached storage drive. A select group of beta testers will get their hands on Plex Cloud, enabling them to set up a Plex server in one minute and use Amazon’s consumer cloud storage service, including the ability to stream media to any device. This change removes one of the biggest obstacles to adoption of Plex’s solution for personal media: the need for a dedicated server. Continue reading Plex, Amazon Launch Beta Test of Cloud-Based Media Center

With Amazon Web Services Direct Connect now available in Equinix’s Los Angeles data centers, the company has bumped up its number of metros offering the AWS cloud service to 12 (five of which are located in North America). Direct Connect enables companies to safely integrate their infrastructure with public cloud services to benefit performance, network consistency and overall costs. The Equinix LA campus features four IBX data centers connected via Metro Connect, providing a scalable and secure system for digital content and entertainment companies. Continue reading Equinix Offers AWS Direct Connect Cloud Service via LA Hub

Amazon announced its fifth consecutive quarterly profit yesterday, and its third consecutive record-setting profit. Revenue increased 31 percent; sales rose to $30.4 billion from $23.19 billion. The company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, accounted for an impressive 56 percent of Amazon’s operating income, and it grew 58 percent in the last quarter. “The results show Amazon moving toward investors’ long-held hope of consistent profitability after a lengthy period of heavy investments and quarterly losses,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “Overall, Amazon posted a second-quarter $857 million profit, or $1.78 a share, compared with $92 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier.” Continue reading Amazon Posts Record Profit and Significant Growth for AWS

As the latest in its ongoing Digital Town Square series, the Entertainment Technology Center at USC held a symposium on “Rethinking Digital Archiving and Storage” on June 9 at Amazon’s Santa Monica facilities. Approximately 80 people from all the major Hollywood studios, archivists and post production professionals participated in the interactive forum that examined the challenges in current archiving and storage practices, the pressures to change those practices, and emerging solutions. Continue reading ETC Hosts Digital Town Square on Digital Archiving, Storage

Amazon is testing an as-of-yet unannounced new cloud service that will let businesses run a wider range of artificial intelligence software on its computers, say people close to the situation. This move puts Amazon, which launched Amazon Web Services in a limited offering in this area last year, in closer competition with Google, Microsoft and IBM, which have already launched various cloud services. The new service will help development of pattern recognition, speech transcription and other robust applications. Continue reading Amazon Creating New Cloud Services for Artificial Intelligence

Boosted by Amazon Web Services, Amazon just posted its most profitable quarter in its nearly 22-year history. The company’s revenue is often on a roller coaster; for Q1 2016, it showed net income of $513 million ($1.07 a share), compared to losses of $57 million (12 cents a share) in the same quarter last year. Revenue has bumped to $29.13 billion from $22.72 billion a year ago, with share prices rising more than 12 percent. This compares with less-than-stellar Q1 reports from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Intel. Continue reading Amazon Profits from AWS, Doubles-Down on Original Content

Silicon Valley has dubbed machine learning and artificial intelligence as the next big thing. Today’s tsunami of data has created the need to make sense of it, quickly and efficiently. Although recent focus has been on giant public clouds from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, now those companies’ abilities to use AI to parse all that data has become the latest arena of competition. All three companies are now striving to define the next gen platform, with Google in the lead and Microsoft and Amazon playing catch up. Continue reading Amazon, Google and Microsoft Race to Dominate AI Platform

Netflix became one of the largest companies to move all its information technology to Amazon Web Services’ public cloud platform, completing a process that began seven years ago. The company says that, among hundreds of IT functions in the cloud, it’s moved business logic, distributed databases, big data processing and analytics, recommendations and transcoding apps to the AWS servers, and shut down its last on-premise data center. The shift to cloud services also helped Netflix expand to 130 more countries. Continue reading Netflix Pioneers Upcoming Trend of Moving IT to Public Cloud

As big companies such as General Electric and Netflix close down their data centers and move operations to the cloud, Amazon and Microsoft are enjoying rising revenues in their cloud operations — and increasing competition between each other. In the process, they’re also gaining dominance over rivals including Google and IBM. Recently, GE has reported whittling down its reliance on data centers from 34 to four. Netflix closed its last data center at the end of last summer. Continue reading Amazon, Microsoft Lead Boom in Cloud Services for Enterprise

Amazon’s growth is impressive — but it still, apparently, does not meet investors’ high expectations. With profits in Prime and Amazon Web Services, the company just delivered the largest quarterly profit in its 20-year history, but its shares plummeted 15 percent in after-hours trading, erasing more than $30 billion in market value. Shareholders were perhaps spooked by a 20.5 percent jump in operating costs, to $34.6 billion. Yet Amazon still out-performed other tech titans, including Alphabet, Apple and Facebook. Continue reading Amazon Doubles Market Value, Plans to Launch Music Service

Facebook announced yesterday that it plans to shutter Parse, its toolkit and support platform for mobile developers the company hoped would serve the Internet of Things and lead to a cloud business that could compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Parse provides developers with support and tools that enable programmers to write code rather than spend valuable time maintaining the back end. Users of the platform include developers at productivity app Quip and Expedia’s travel website Orbitz. The social giant paid a reported $85 million to acquire Parse in 2013. Continue reading Facebook Makes Decision to Shutter Services Platform Parse

Cisco released new data that shows some companies may not know the extent of their employees’ usage of external cloud computing services, instead of the employer’s in-house cloud services. The practice of using systems inside organizations without approval is called “Shadow IT.” According to Cisco, there is 70 percent more Shadow IT activity than there was six months ago. Cisco gathered the data by surveying CIOs and running software that could track cloud activity. Unauthorized cloud usage could pose serious security threats. Continue reading Cisco Reveals Unauthorized Cloud Usage Trend in Companies