Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: cloud computing

  • Microsoft sees off the Google threat

    Microsoft sees off the Google threat

    Earlier this decade it looked like Microsoft’s most profitable business line was doomed as Google Docs threatened to disrupt the Office franchise.

    Yesterday Microsoft showed how they had seen off that threat when reporting their second-quarter results that beat Wall Street analysts’ estimates and saw the company’s stock market capitalisation topped $500bn, the first time since the year 2000.

    Microsoft’s results were mainly due to its  cloud computing products with Azure growing at 93% year on year, Office 365 commercial at 47% and Office Consumer Products and Cloud Services at 22%.

    Earlier in the week, cloud security company Okta released its Business at Work study that looked at trends in the commercial use of online services which showed how Microsoft’s products are dominating the market.

    Microsoft’s advantage was underscored in a Gartner paper late last year. The Current State of Cloud Office and What to Do About It report found 10.7 percent of public listed companies surveyed were using Office 365 as opposed to 5.2% using Google. The rest had deployed hybrid or on-premise productivity suites.
    So Microsoft seemed to have seen off the biggest threat to one of their most important products which for Alphabet/Google should be a worrying development as G-Suite (as it’s now called) has failed to become a meaningful revenue centre – advertising profits still made up 22 billion of the company’s $25 billion revenues in their last results.
    Google’s failure to diversify should worry Alphabet investors, particularly given the headstart the company had over Microsoft Office in the early days of G-suite as then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer struggled to shift the company’s key product lines onto the cloud.
    How much the initiatives of G-Suite’s new leader Diane Green can go in making Google’s product more attractive is a big question as Microsoft have shown they can match or beat their competitors’ offerings in areas like collaboration and artificial intelligence.

    Despite Microsoft’s success in seeing off Google in the office productivity market the company still lags Alphabet market capitalisation of $570 billion but Microsoft have show they are far from a spent force in the software industry.

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  • GorillaStack – the weekend hacking exercise that grew into a business

    GorillaStack – the weekend hacking exercise that grew into a business

    As a business born out of a weekend hack  Sydney based GorillaStack is almost a classic tech tale.

    “I was involved in a startup previously,” says GorillaStack’s CTO, Elliott Spira, recalling how the company was his co-founder Oliver Berger at the AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last week.

    “We noticed we had spikes in our AWS spend, there was a big attribution issue and one day we said ‘how about we do a weekend project and try to spin something up that listens to our Cloudwatch metrics and tells us how much we’re spending at any time of the month.”

    As the challenge was accepted, the team went to work. “We hacked away all weekend as we like to do, being nerds, and by the time the weekend was over we had the basic cost dashboard that told us how much we were spending each month.”

    Adding more features

    “The next weekend we decided to add another feature and we decided to add cost alerting where we’d get an email when we passed a certain threshold. That was really cool as we could budget and know when we were spending too much.”

    “On the following weekend we started working on periodic alerts on how much we were spending over a set set time and from there the idea started to prosper, we thought ‘oh wow, we have a bit of a product going here. Let’s show some friends who also use AWS.’ From that feedback we found people wanted to keep the dashboards up and keep track of what was being spent.”

    Today GorillaStack offers a service that allows companies to manage their AWS usage, something that can easily get expensive for organisations not closely watching what they are using. “What we try to do is make a cultural change where people become conscious of what is actually theirs in the cloud.” Elliott says. “We’re actually seeing that change.”

    Living the culture

    “In terms of that culture, we try to live that culture as well. We have private Slack channels with each of our customers so there’s a constant line of communication,” says Oliver. “Those Slack channels have proved to be an effective customer support and product development tool. “we’ve fostered quite a good community.”

    With the initial hack being successful the company was formally founded in June 2015 and to date is bootstrapped, having not taken any investor’s money. “We want to get to a stage where we’re comfortable with the product,”says Oliver.

    Currently the user base includes paid customers like Citrix, Bauer Media, Health Direct and the Australian Football League. “We have quite a good spread in terms of geography and mix of customers,” observer Oliver. “Right now the breadth suits us.”

    Applying the freemium business model

    Following the freemium model, the company also offers a free tier offering a single switch. “If you want anything more you move onto our paid tiers,” says Elliott.

    To the question whether the company is looking at catering to other services such as Microsoft Azure or the Google Cloud, the dominance of AWS comes into play. “Right now we’re definitely sticking with the giant, we’re really looking at growing our capability so we do more and offer more to our existing customers,” says Elliott. “I think it’s really important to focus on delivering value to them and our business’ future,” Elliot says.

    Looking to the immediate future, their focus is on extending their current customer offering. “We’ve a fair bit on our roadmap, we have a bit focus on chatops with a more in depth integration with Slack and Hipchat integration with our existing product,” says Elliott.

    In talking to the Gorilla Stack founders, it’s striking just how the startup follows the classic tech model of a bootstrapped company that started by a bunch of hackers solving their own problem. How the business evolves will be fascinating to watch.

    Paul travelled to AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas as a guest of Amazon Web Services

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  • Saving pets with tech

    Saving pets with tech

    “Like all great ideas it was conceived over a beer and executed over coffee,” says John Bishop, the joint founder and co-CEO of Pet Rescue. “A couple of friends and I were sitting in a bar back in 2003 and we came up with the idea, had a look around and there was no-one doing it in Australia at the time.”

    John was talking to Decoding the New Economy at last week’s AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas where he some time to explain how Pet Rescue uses the web to connect prospective pet owners with rescue shelters.

    “Basically we help people find rescue pets in need of adoption,” John explains. “We work with the vast number of rescue groups in Australia. By rescue groups I mean pounds, shelters, vet clinics and foster care networks. There’s about 950 of those in Pet Rescue at the moment.”

    Rabbits, guinea pigs and rats

    The system allows accredited animal rescue services to list the pets they have available for adoption, “primarily cats and dogs but also rabbits, guinea pigs, pigs, chickens, there’s even one rat we’ve rehomed,” John laughs.

    John was working as an IT manager with a consulting business on the side in 2004 when the site launched. “We didn’t know if it would work but I had the idea in my head the whole time I was building it that if one pet found a home rather than being killed then it would be worthwhile.”

    “From day one I designed Pet Rescue to be as hands off as possible, once the members had access to it they could upload their own photos and things like that. It wasn’t groundbreaking in 2003 but it wasn’t that common”

    “One of the biggest problems we faced in those early days was many of the rescue groups didn’t have digital cameras. So we did a promotion with a bunch of Kodak digital cameras that had been donated to us and gave them to the groups.”

    A problem of scale

    The site was quickly a success but that came with issues, particularly when the site was mentioned in the press or had a lot of social media attention. “Eventually we hit problems as I had gave no thought of architecting a site that would scale.”

    While that scaling process didn’t go without problems, the service now sits in the public cloud with AWS so the Pet Rescue team can get on with connecting pets with owners, and John expects to help rehouse four thousand pets by the end of the year.

    “Our challenge at the moment is we have a weird supply and demand problem happening, we have half a million unique visitors a month and helping rehome about five to six thousand. Another challenge is we’re still working on an old model of handling enquiries about the pets.”

    “Our goal is to get to the point where we rehome 200,000 pets a year. Right now we’re looking at 90,000. It’s a bit of a magic number because that’s the number of pets that are unnecessirly killed each year so if we can get to that two hundred thousand we can zero that out.”

    Finding funding

    The bigger task for Pet Rescue is to find funding with the organisation as John doesn’t believe paid registration for the rescue groups or users is the best thing for the site, “we want to have as few barriers as possible,” he says.

    Currently the service earns some money from advertising with some corporate partnerships in the pipeline. “We need money, it costs a lot to keep the site up and costs a lot for development.”

    While many startups and corporations talk about using tech for good, Pet Rescue’s and John Bishop’s mission of ending unnecessary deaths of unplaced pets is a genuine worthy cause. By making it easier for companion animals to be adopted by the right households shows what technology can do.

    Paul travelled to Las Vegas and the Re:Invent conference as a guest of Amazon Web Services.

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  • Computing on the edge

    Computing on the edge

    As with every vendor conference, this year’s AWS Re:Invent convention in Las Vegas bombarded the audience with new product announcements and releases.

    One of the interesting aspects for the Internet of Things was the announcement of Amazon Greengrass, a service that stores machine data on remote equipment which combines the company’s Lambda serverless computing and IoT services.

    Further pushing Amazon’s move into the IoT space was CEO Andy Jassy’s announcement that chip makers such as Qualcomm and Intel will be building Lambda functions into their chipsets, further embedding AWS into the ecosystem.

    Jassy also touted the company’s new Snowball Edge, a slimmed down version of their Snowball data transfer unit that also include some processing features, that is aimed at storing machine data at remote or moving locations such as ships, aircraft, farms or oil rigs.

    That latter function ties into one of the key aspects about the Internet of Things – that most data doesn’t have to, or can’t, be transmitted over the internet. This is something companies like Cisco have focused on in their edge computing strategies.

    With AWS dominating the cloud computing industry – Gartner estimates the company is ten times bigger than the next 14 companies combined – the worry for customers and regulators will be how much control the organisation has of the world’s data.

    It’s hard though not to be impressed at the range of products the company has, and the speed they get them to market, the onus is on companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook to allocate the resources and talent to match AWS in the marketplace.

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  • ABC Nightlife – building the businesses of the future

    ABC Nightlife – building the businesses of the future

    This Thursday night join Dom Knight and myself on ABC Nightlife to discuss what tools you can use to start or improve your business and how can we encourage more people to have a go.

    Last week the last Australian car making jobs finished and a survey of the Geelong Ford workers found only one percent were interested in starting a new business.

    If you missed the spot, you can listen to the podcast through the Nightlife website.

    Despite the reluctance to start new businesses it’s never been easier to do so with a range of tools making it simpler to run one. Tonight on the Nightlife we look at some of those tools and what we can do to encourage more people to have a go at running their own companies.

    For the program, I’ve a compiled a list of tools businesses should be using. It certainly isn’t exhaustive or definitive and if you have any suggestions on better or newer tools, I’ll be happy to add them.

    Some of the questions we cover on the program include;

    • who ran the survey of motor industry workers?
    • what were most of them going to do?
    • so what sort of businesses can these workers go into?
    • what programs are being offered to these workers?
    • how has starting a business changed over the past twenty years?
    • is the focus on tech startups intimidating people who might want to start a business?
    • what are the basic tools every business should have?
    • a few years ago social media was all the rage, does it matter any more?
    • what’s the number one advice for anyone thinking of starting a business?

    Join us

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Australian Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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