Accenture and Microsoft help Unilever with huge cloud transition

A Microsoft building.

Accenture, Microsoft and Unilever have completed one of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the consumer goods industry. The migration has helped Unilever - whose 400+ brands are used by 3.4 billion people daily - become a cloud-only enterprise.

Accenture and Microsoft, together with their joint venture, Avanade, worked closely with Unilever to deliver the transformation in just 18 months with minimal disruption to business operations. It has not only helped ensure...

5 April 2023 | Cloud Computing

Teradata VantageCloud integrated with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

Teradata has integrated Teradata VantageCloud, an cloud analytics and data platform, with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML).

VantageCloud’s scalability, openness and analytics - ClearScape Analytics - combined with Azure ML’s ability to simplify and accelerate the ML lifecycle could help customers unlock the full value of their data, even in the most complex and demanding environments.

Despite continued investment by organisations in AI/ML, many AI/ML...

9 March 2023 | Collaboration

Microsoft buys stake in London Stock Exchange Group in twist on digital transformation deals 

Microsoft has announced a 10-year strategic partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to put the financial markets providers’ infrastructure and data analytics onto the Microsoft cloud – and has acquired a 4% stake in the group in the process. 

Seasoned cloud industry watchers will know how these sorts of strategic partnerships play out. The client comes on board for an undisclosed amount, the right noises are made around improving customer and end-user...

15 December 2022 | Banking & Finance

Snowflake becomes available in UK on Microsoft Azure

Snowflake, a data cloud company, has announced Snowflake’s general availability on Microsoft Azure in the UK, driven by high customer demand for local data residency from both the private and public sector in the UK.

Snowflake enables institutions across multiple industries to deploy data and analytical workloads to suit their business-critical needs. With true multi-cloud availability across three major public clouds, organisations can deploy Snowflake’s unique data...

6 December 2022 | Data Centres

OVHcloud submits antitrust complaint on Microsoft’s EU cloud services

Antitrust

OVHcloud, a French cloud computing company, has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft to the EU’s top competition regulator, the European Commission.

The complaint, first reported on by the Wall Street Journal, focuses on Microsoft’s licencing of its products, such as its Office software suite. It was filed last summer but has only recently come to light.

OVHcloud says this licencing makes it more expensive to use cloud services that compete with Microsoft...

17 March 2022 | Microsoft

Microsoft extends security offering for multi-cloud environments

Cloud Security Umbrella

Microsoft is extending its Defender for Cloud service to cover the Google Cloud Platform in an effort to simplify security for organisations utilising multi-cloud strategies.

The move will see all three of the world’s largest public cloud providers protected under the same Microsoft solution for posture management and threat protection, with AWS and Azure already under its scope.

Support for Google Cloud will come with recommendations for users on how to configure...

24 February 2022 | Data & Analytics

Cloud infrastructure market grew to £131bn in 2021, up 37%

Floating Boats

The cloud infrastructure market grew by 37% from £95 billion in 2020 to £131 billion in 2021, according to Synergy Research data.

Focusing in on the final quarter, enterprise spending clocked out at £37 billion, marking a similar 36% increase over the previous year.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google continued to grow at astonishing rates considering the maturity of the market at this point.

John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, said: “It is a...

8 February 2022 | AWS

Microsoft profits up 21% as cloud and PC markets continue to boom

A Microsoft building.

Microsoft profits soared 21% in the second quarter of its 2022 thanks, once again, to the ongoing growth of its cloud business.

Whilst not quite the 44% surge the company saw at the beginning of 2021, the global PC and cloud markets continued to feel the benefits of pandemic demand throughout the year.

Total revenue for the December quarter sat at £38.3 billion, a 20% increase over the same period in Microsoft’s last fiscal year.

Amy Hood, executive VP and...

26 January 2022 | Cloud Computing

JEDI: Oracle and Google enter the bidding war for Pentagon cloud contract

Pentagon

The prolonged JEDI war - between Amazon and Microsoft, not Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker - for the $10 billion contract to modernise the US Department of Defence's (DoD) cloud infrastructure has entered a new saga.

Microsoft won the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) contract back in 2019, although its victory was short-lived when Amazon filed for and won an injunction due to potential presidential interference in 2020.

Since then, the Pentagon ruled that...

23 November 2021 | AWS

Informatica and Microsoft unveil program to launch Modern Cloud Analytics on Microsoft Azure

A man looking at data analytics on a tablet.

Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management firm, has created a joint Modern Cloud Analytics program with Microsoft Azure.

It is hoped this will provide customers with one of the fastest, lowest cost, lowest risk paths to modernise PowerCenter ETL and on-premises data warehouses to Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloudä (IDMC) on Azure and Azure Synapse Analytics. 

This offering is available on the Azure Marketplace, helping customers streamline...

17 November 2021 | Cloud Computing