Monday Morning Impact – September 4

Canalys: Global Cloud Services Market Growth Slows

Worldwide cloud infrastructure services spending increased 16% to US$72.4 billion in Q2 2023, according to market research from Canalys. However, this growth rate represents a decline against the previous quarter’s 19%, as the market feels the effect of spending pressures, as well as the impact of the market’s greater size. In Q2 2023, the top three vendors, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, collectively grew 20% – down from 22% in Q1 – to account for 65% of total spending. While AWS and Microsoft both saw a deceleration in growth, Google Cloud’s growth rate remained stable compared with the previous quarter, at 31%.

In the current business landscape, where emphasis is placed on cost control, cloud vendors must secure a significant influx of new customers and workloads to drive revenue growth, according to Canalys. The emergence of AI technology is introducing new cloud workloads and is set to fuel massive demand for computing capacity, creating new opportunities for cloud growth. Notably in this quarter, both AWS and Microsoft launched new AI-oriented partner programs, recognizing the importance of collaborating with partners to drive customers’ use of their AI products.

“The most common collaboration model involves partners contributing their industry expertise, business process knowledge and data analytics experience within relationships,” said Yi Zhang, Research Analyst at Canalys. “Cloud providers, in turn, offer partners early exposure to their emerging technologies and provide technical support.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continued to lead the cloud infrastructure services market in Q2 2023, accounting for 30% of total spend, an increase of 12% year on year. Microsoft Azure accounted for 26% of the market after growing 26% annually, positioning it as the second-largest cloud service provider in Q2 2023. Google Cloud grew 31% year on year in Q2 2023, the strongest growth of the top three hyperscalers, to capture 9% of the cloud market.

Channel Impact^®
The focus in this space is shifting toward partners that are building service practices around AI, engaging in sales and marketing initiatives that focus on AI, producing original thought leadership and compelling case studies around AI applications, and selling solutions that are embedded with AI capabilities.

Pure Storage Expands Strategic Partnership with Microsoft to Accelerate Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Pure Storage, a Santa Clara, California-based data storage technology and services company, has announced an expanded, multi-year strategic product and go-to-market partnership with Microsoft, that combines Pure Storage’s capabilities with native Microsoft Azure services, leveraging Azure’s new Premium SSD v2 and introducing them to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) in Preview.

The combined solution promises to optimize costs by achieving a high data reduction ration on VMWare workloads in Azure, leveraging Pure Storage’s compression and deduplication technology combined with Pure Storage’s ability to decouple block storage costs from compute costs. Further cost advantages are expected to be achieved by integrating Azure’s latest storage solution, Premium SSD v2 disk.

Pure Storage “Safemode” provides the ability to leverage snapshots to instantly restore protected data sets. Customers can use this protection with their on-premises VMware environments with FlashArray, and can now also leverage this functionality with Azure VMware Solution and Pure Cloud Block Store.

Disaster recovery benefits are also envisioned by the company. High availability and cloud replication capabilities enable disaster recovery targets on AVS that can be configured with minimal compute and storage that can scale on-demand.

In addition, by using the same data management platform both on-premises and in the cloud, organizations can track, manage, deploy, and provide consistent multi-cloud governance for their data.

“This expanded partnership between Pure Storage and Microsoft creates a significant milestone, ushering in a new age of cloud migration, and ultimately driving faster, more cost-effective adoption of cloud services,” said Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. “By optimizing performance and cost at scale, we look forward to unlocking the number of mission-critical use cases that we can serve in the coming years.”

Channel Impact^®
The expanded partnership between Pure Storage and Microsoft promises to help organizations reduce risks associated with deployments while right-sizing and scaling storage and compute independently as workload demands change.

Trend Micro Unlocks Flagship Platform Capabilities for New Partner Category

Trend Micro Incorporated, a Dallas-based cybersecurity company, has rolled out a new offering for MSSPs, service partners, and pure-play MDR companies.

The company’s new “Trend Vision One for Service Providers program is intended to provide turnkey threat detection and response with extended SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) capabilities, offering multi-tenant SOC capabilities and hundreds of third-party integrations across the IT environment and with other security vendors.

Elements include end-to-end SOC technology with inspection and analytics, extensive integrations that offer visibility, analysis, API integration to offer co-managed services, automation across a wide range of products, management from a single pane of glass, and incident response playbooks.

“Breaches are on the rise, but many global organizations can’t afford the investment of time, resources and staff that a full SOC requires,” said Louise McEvoy, vice president of US channels at Trend Micro. “And those that can often find their analysts frustrated by tool sprawl and overwhelmed by alerts. This opens a lucrative and important opportunity for MSSPs to deliver more value to customers, as long as they can find the right platform to deliver SOCaaS.”

Channel Impact^®
Commensurate with major growth in the MSSP market, the new program is expected to further enable the global ecosystem of MSSP partners that customers rely on amidst a cybersecurity skills shortage.