Category Archives: Cloud Computing

More CIOs and CTOs are choosing to architect and deploy hybrid multi-cloud computing environments in 2017. The trend is being driven by growing demand to support digital transformation projects that are led by the C-suite.

Newly released results from the CloudView Survey 2017 reveal the top drivers of cloud adoption - include improving agility and security, as well as standardising IT infrastructure.

As multi-cloud environments and hybrid cloud become more prevalent, the survey revealed that 87 percent of cloud users have adopted some capabilities for a hybrid cloud strategy - that's an increase of 17 percent compared to 2016, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

"Beyond adoption and maturity, a series of questions on 'why are' or 'why aren't' respondents moving more workloads to the cloud makes up a key part of the study," said Benjamin McGrath, senior research analyst at IDC.

Additional findings from the study include:

"When we look at the shift in IT spend over the next 12-24 months to more of a mix of multiple types of cloud deployments, we see each type of organisation take a different journey," added McGrath.

The study gathers data on the journey to cloud and how it differs by vertical and micro-vertical by country, by company size, company age, and by job title.

What industry-specific projects are moving to the cloud? What are end-users looking for from their vendors in each country? How will all that change over time?

CloudView 2017 encompasses thousands of surveys from line-of-business cloud buyers and IT operations staff on cloud adoption rates, trends, and attitudes.

Survey respondents are from more than 6,000 organisations worldwide, all of whom are current users of cloud services.

To gain a complete picture of potential cloud customers along the journey, data is also collected from respondents at organisations who are not currently utilising cloud.

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Exploring the top drivers of cloud computing adoption - Cloud Tech

Microsoft reorganized its global sales force today to heighten its focus on selling cloud services instead of standalone pieces of software, according to The Wall Street Journal. The reorganization, just the latest in a series of structural changes the company has undergone since former CEO Steve Ballmer resigned and Satya Nadella took over in 2014, wont immediately result in layoffs. Yet the WSJ reports that thousands of jobs could be cut down the line as a result of the sales shuffle.

This doesnt appear like it will have a huge impact on how Microsoft does business on a day-to-day basis. Since the appointment of Nadella, the former head of Microsofts cloud division, the company has put more and more resources toward building out its Azure cloud computing platform and selling software subscriptions to businesses. This is all part of a steady shift away from one-time software licenses for products like Windows and Office. Microsoft is still playing catch up against Amazon, with the massive success of its AWS business, and now trying to stave off competition from Google and its growing cloud division.

Microsoft says it will now focus on two distinct areas: big enterprise customers, and then small to medium-sized businesses. Its not exactly clear what changes are in the pipeline, but an email from Judson Althoff, Microsofts executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, says sales reorganization is designed to align the right resources for the right customer at the right time. The magnitude of the potential layoffs is unclear, but the WSJ says they will likely occur in offices all around the globe.

Originally posted here:

Microsoft could lay off 'thousands' as it focuses more on cloud services - The Verge

Microsoft is planning a reorganization of its sales groups that will likely bring layoffs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Its unclear what groups will be affected and where they are located. The shift, which could be announced as soon as next week, comes as Microsoft retools its legions of sales teams to emphasize its cloud-computing products instead of licenses for boxed software.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

Plans for a cloud-focused reorganization were reported earlier by thePuget Sound Business JournalandBloomberg News, which said the shift will bring some of the most significant changes to the sales force in years. Local marketing efforts in various countries will be affected, Bloomberg reported.

The weeks around the end of Microsofts fiscal year, which was Friday, often include announcements of a corporate reorganization for the year ahead.

Microsofts sales groups have been in flux since the exit of longtime chief operating officer Kevin Turner last year. At the time ofhis departurefrom the company, he oversaw 51,000 employees in an umbrella organization for sales, marketing, operations and Microsofts corporate technology needs.

That group, Microsofts largest, was broken up.

Microsoft sales executive Judson Althoff took over the companys business-oriented sales force, and Jean-Philippe Cortois received oversight for Microsofts foreign sales and marketing subsidiaries.

Althoff hasbeen criticalof Microsofts former sales approach, which he characterized as an attempt to sell Azure, Microsofts platform of on-demand computing power and software services, using strategies learned from decades of selling out-of-the-box software.

Layoffs announced last July which targeted 2,850 cuts over the course of Microsofts just-ended fiscal year included at least 900 employees of the sales group. Althoff said in September that Microsoft had also added to the payroll about 1,000 salespeople with specialties in selling cloud-computing products.

Microsoft at the end of March employed about 121,500 people, including 45,500 in Washington state. The total tally includes the 10,000 employees Microsoft scooped up in its$27billion acquisitionof professional social network LinkedIn in December.

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Microsoft said to be planning sales force overhaul; layoffs likely - Yakima Herald-Republic

Cloud is a dynamic technology, and enterprises need to be flexible to keep up.

But before they successfully adopt the latest trends in cloud computing -- ranging from containers to continuous monitoring -- enterprises first face a number of challenges. David Linthicum, a TechTarget contributor and SVP of Cloud Technology Partners, a cloud consultancy company in Boston, explores top cloud trends, their effect on enterprise IT teams and more in these five podcasts with cloud experts. Read on and tune in to know what to expect.

With the proliferation of cloud services, enterprises want to take advantage of new offerings and better prices at any time. Unfortunately, the more dependent an enterprise becomes on a particular cloud provider and its native services, the harder it is to move applications.

Lock-in risks are high in cloud -- not just with vendors but also with models. With a private cloud, enterprises can be locked into their own design, and in public cloud, they can become dependent on add-on services. Any type of lock-in will result in high prices, according to Marten Mickos, CEO at HackerOne, a provider of vulnerability tracking software.

Many believe one of the latest trends in cloud computing -- containers -- could reduce these lock-in risks through the promise of portability. Containers continue to rise in popularity because they can make it easier to move applications from one cloud platform to another. But there's a catch: Many of the cloud providers' container management services, such as Azure Container Service, Google Container Engine and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Container Service, pose lock-in risks of their own.

"Docker and container management and orchestration solutions have made portability vastly easier, but as soon as you start availing yourself to the special services of whatever platform you're on, you're hooked," Linthicum says.

As public cloud adoption continues to rise, some enterprises question whether private cloud is dead. Others, however, believe that private cloud is alive and well, as certain compliance, cost and security requirements still fuel deployments.

Compliance is tricky, and certain requirements and standards restrict some enterprises to a private cloud. Others are reluctant to migrate to public cloud because of potentially higher costs and previous investments in an on-premises data center. In addition, there can be high costs associated with training and hiring staff to maintain a public cloud deployment.

"There is no magic button on the side of the server that you press that makes it suddenly cloud-capable. It's going to require software infrastructure, hardware infrastructure [and] operational skills," says Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, a cloud consulting firm.

Before you make your final decision about migration -- either public or private -- review what applications you currently run and what you want to run in the future. If compliance is still an issue, consider hybrid or multicloud models.

Hacking is a growing threat and large businesses, such as Target and Home Depot, have been victims of malicious attacks. It is time for enterprises to go on the offensive and adopt ongoing monitoring and testing practices to ensure their data is secure.

"Hacking is a business now," says Zohar Alon, CEO and co-founder of Dome9 Security Ltd., a provider of cloud management as a service. "When the other side can benefit from it financially, [and] quite easily now with bitcoin, it's not surprising to see those [hacking businesses] emerge [and see] ransomware all over the place."

In addition, one of the latest trends in cloud computing is serverless architectures, which bring new security risks. Because of a serverless application's design, enterprises can't secure it with the same encryption or identity access management practices they are used to. To reduce risk, they should also ensures serverless functions don't have more permissions than they need, Alon says.

Once an enterprise runs applications in the cloud, they generally want those apps to keep running -- which is where backup and recovery come in. But some of the latest trends in cloud computing, such as the internet of things, increase the amount of data floating around. This has some IT teams rethinking their backup and recovery strategies to maintain availability in case of an outage.

For example, some enterprises have replaced strongly consistent databases, such as MySQL, with eventually consistent databases, such as Apache Cassandra, says Tarun Thakur, co-founder and CEO at Datos IO, a data protection software provider. These databases are more distributed in nature and can offer more scale.

Airlines such as Delta, JetBlue and United, experienced data center outages that affected operations. It is important to have a backup and recovery plan in place to prevent major disruptions as one system fails over to another. IT teams should learn from these high-profile outages -- namely, that, even as they adopt cloud and other new services, they shouldn't "compromise what is needed to keep ... applications and business running all the time," Thakur says.

Some of the latest trends in cloud computing -- such as hybrid and multicloud models -- have forced vendors to reevaluate their services and ask whether they meet enterprise needs. In many cases, the easiest way for them to fill out their portfolios is to partner with or acquire other companies.

A notable example of this is Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware, whose partnership enables VMware's software-defined data center software to run on AWS. Enterprises benefit from these deals because of simplified integration, but often in these situations, one vendor makes out better than the other.

"AWS gets to sit back and watch the meter go higher and lock in to more VMware install base and, perhaps, put in an advantage over what Microsoft can offer," says Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

In 2013, IBM acquired SoftLayer to strengthen its cloud platform. To differentiate itself from the top public cloud providers, IBM continues to focus its efforts on hybrid cloud, as well as machine learning, artificial intelligence and other higher-level services. With more cloud models and technologies, Linthicum and Gardner agree that we will continue to see more partnerships and acquisitions in the future.

Artificial intelligence services expand in public cloud

Consider Azure Functions for your serverless needs

Are enterprises ready for machine learning in cloud?

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Five podcasts to catch up on the latest trends in cloud computing - TechTarget

With its promises of lowering costs and fostering a more agile IT, cloud computing holds an almost magical allure for many companies today: They think moving an application or two to the cloud will solve all their problems, said Ed Featherston, vice president and principal architect at Cloud Technology Partners.

"Then they get the bill at the end of the month and go, 'Oh my God, what happened?'" Featherston said at the recent Cloud Expo in New York. "The magic doesn't happen by itself. You actually need to plan."

In this SearchCIO video, filmed on the concourse of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Featherston and two other cloud watchers discuss the biggest cloud computing challenges IT execs are dealing with today.

Sumit Sarkar sees another type of struggle. He's a data evangelist at Progress, a vendor of data integration and data interoperability services. As organizations build cloud architecture, plugging in new technologies and services, "data is getting somewhat more abstracted," or not immediately and easily available to analytics professionals, who need to slice and dice it.

"If I build these microservices, my data is behind these different APIs. What if I have a data science practice team? How do I make sure they have access to data to really bring business value?" Sarkar says. IT executives and their business counterparts have to keep that in mind as they're "rearchitecting and refactoring all of their systems."

Greg Bledsoe, managing consultant at Accenture, says companies moving to the cloud need to adopt new ways of working. Bledsoe helps companies make the transition to DevOps, the software development process that emphasizes frequent interaction and communication between development and operations teams.

Cloud computing, he says, makes experimenting cheap. "If it doesn't work, throw it away. But companies are still managing their cloud infrastructure as if it were physical infrastructure."

So someone on the business side might request a new tech project from IT, gets it, tries it out, but then it's not quite right.

"Throw something back over the wall and have somebody hoist it back over the wall to you. This makes no sense for cloud," Bledsoe says. "It's totally a legacy artifact of our past management strategies that is completely unnecessary."

What cloud computing challenges plague IT execs today?

Ed Featherston: The biggest struggle I've seen with clients in cloud is fully understanding what it is and what it isn't for them -- and what it's going to provide them. The classic of, 'If I go to the cloud, it's going to solve all my problems.'

One of my favorite mantras is 'No technology negates the need for good design and planning.' Cloud is no exception. And the biggest challenge I see people having with cloud is if they don't do that first. If they just say, 'Oh, I'm just going to take this workload, I'm going to drop it in AWS [Amazon Web Services], I just log into the console, fire up a couple instances -- boom, I'm off to the races.' Then they get the bill at the end of the month and go, 'Oh my God, what happened?'

The magic doesn't happen by itself. You actually need to plan. You need to understand 'What am I going to get out of it? Am I going to the cloud for cost savings?' Then you better look really closely at it when you do that.

I was talking with somebody earlier about the fact that -- you move your first application over and you say, 'OK, why am I not saving any money?' Well, because the servers that application was on still have five other applications on them. I still have to maintain them. I still have to pay for them. So, I'm paying for those servers still. Plus, now I'm paying Amazon or [Microsoft] Azure for that cloud instance that I just created, so I'm actually spending more money. You actually have to think that out if you're going for the agility and being able to move faster. Do your development processes and operations processes support that capability? Yes, cloud can make you very agile -- if you have the processes in place to do it. If you're still a standard, Waterfall development type of shop that has no concept of what development and operations are and tying them together, the cloud's not going to make it go faster for you. If anything, it's probably going to make it go slower if you're not ready for that.

So those are the kinds of challenges I see clients having out there. It's getting those expectations set. It's part of why I enjoy being where I am at our company, because it's one of the things we push really hard with the clients -- of No, we're not going to start with, Go to the cloud. We're going to start with, What do you want from it? Let's look at what you've got, let's understand how we're going to get there and what the stumbling blocks are -- then, we start moving to the cloud.

Sumit Sarkar: What we're seeing is there's a lot of people who start -- I don't know if they're buzzwords, but at the show in the morning we had a kickoff about cloud-native architectures, and there's 12 attributes of them. And then there's something -- I think I heard the term cloud washed: You take an application, you stick it in the cloud, and you rebrand it as cloud.

But the thing is, in between, there's a big mix of different levels. I think with the innovation that's happening is that between a cloud-native architecture and something that's cloud-washed, for example, there's a whole lot of things happening in innovation. So I've heard different people who are taking maybe some NoSQL technologies to supplement an ERP system. Some people are building out some microservices on top of existing databases if you have a distributed data architecture.

So, what's happening is data is getting somewhat more abstracted as we have this spectrum of cloud-native and, let's say, untraditional or the monoliths. So they decompose these things, data gets moved around, make it scalable. So, what's happening is it's causing a challenge for the analytics professionals. So, if you think about the people doing operations intelligence, that is the last thing sometimes people think about. I encourage folks, the CxO people, to think about analytics as they're rearchitecting and refactoring all of their systems. Think about it: If I build these microservices, my data is behind these different APIs. What if I have a data science practice team? How do I make sure they have access to data to really bring business value? Or I have this data engineering team who can really build these nice data repositories to get 360-degree intelligence. How do I make it easy for them to get the data?

So that's what we're seeing in the connectivity space is, How do you provide connectivity for those professionals to still access data as you're refactoring these things in that big spectrum? So the CxO folks, they have these initiatives, and that's something to really think about is, Don't forget the data integration for analytics.

Greg Bledsoe: Because we've come from this legacy of managing physical infrastructure, and we're used to managing physical infrastructure in a very tightly controlled way to protect our investment and control cost, we bring that same mindset to cloud.

This mindset does not really apply to cloud. You don't have to pay for things when you're not using them. The whole power of cloud and the reason that cloud empowers DevOps is because you've cheapened experimentation. It has become dirt-cheap to try something, and if it doesn't work, throw it away.

But companies are still managing their cloud infrastructure as if it were physical infrastructure. And you have a DevOps team or someone that sets up cloud infrastructure for you, you put in a request, you put in ticket, and someone builds something, and a few days later you get a response with some things that are built. And then you start trying to use those and it's not quite right; you do this again. Throw something back over the wall and have somebody hoist it back over the wall to you. This makes no sense for cloud. It's totally a legacy artifact of our past management strategies that is completely unnecessary. So there are mechanisms that you can use to protect your cost and investment without having to centrally manage these architectures -- which is essentially the exact opposite of DevOps. It's a DevOps team that's another silo that doesn't really collaborate to solve the problem. It just becomes another source of wait time, another source of wheel spinning and another source of invisibility to the other teams.

This is exactly how to do DevOps wrong. And a lot of people are trying to implement it this way because it fits in with what they understand. It fits in with what they know. Because they haven't really understood yet that DevOps is a completely different way to manage everything from the infrastructure to the people.

Mekhala Roy filmed this video.

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Cloud computing challenges today: Planning, process and people - TechTarget

Microsoft and file-storage startup Box have signed a deal to sell each other's products, the latest blurring of the lines between friends and rivals in the growing business of cloud-computing.

Box builds web-based file storage and management tools, services that compete head-to-head with Microsoft's own OneDrive and Sharepoint.

Despite that rivalry, the companies have agreed to jointly sell Box services and elements of Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform, they said on Tuesday.

The companies say their engineering teams are also working on building more links between their products, including adding Azure the Box Zones program. That effort lets Box customers opt to store their content in specific areas of Azure's massive global network of data centers. (Box Zones already includes Azure rivals Amazon Web Services and IBM).

Cloud-computing has made some partnerships that would have seemed bizarre in the world of out-of-the-box business software of a generation ago. Microsoft during its dominance of the personal computer heyday developed a reputation for pushing customers to use its range of products at all costs, and shunning those developed by others.

But as the company prioritizes growth in its Azure cloud-computing platform, which enables other companies to build services on Microsoft's network of data centers and rented software services, the Redmond firm has abandoned some of its scorched earth tactics. The company, analysts say, is betting that customers who plug into the cloud will demand that the products they use work well with those of other technology vendors.

Box, based in Redwood City, Calif., began as a startup founded by a pair of college students in Mercer Island. The company is among a slate of startups born in the cloud era that has thrived by building on-demand, web-based tools that replicate or improve on programs companies used to run from their own servers. Box held an initial public offering in 2015, and had sales of $425 million during the most recent 12-month period.

2017 Seattle Times syndicated under contract with NewsEdge/Acquire Media. All rights reserved.

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Microsoft Signs Cloud Computing Partnership with Box - Cloud ... - CIO Today

Software giant #Microsoft is adding another firm to its growing portfolio of cloud and analytics assets for its #cloud computing service, Microsoft #Azure. The software company this week confirmed the acquisition of Cloudyn, an Israeli-based cloud monitoring, and analytics startup. Microsoft made the big announcement on a recent company's blog post.

The deal is said to be part of Microsofts ongoing multi-cloud strategy. The Cloudyn deal will give the software company a cloud billing and management solution platform that provides it with a competitive advantage over its rivals in the hotly contested cloud computing market.

According to TechCrunch, it was in April when the world first hears the news about Microsofts planned acquisition of Cloudyn, which provides tools that help customers manage their cloud billing and costs across multiple cloud platform. That deal has taken a while to work through the terms, but this week, the software giant is making it official. Cloudyn is now part of the tech behemoth. The Redmond-based software company reportedly paid between $50 million to $70 million for the tiny Israeli cloud analytics specialist, the TechCrunch reported.

Founded in 2012 and based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Cloudyn provides companies the ability to monitor their cloud costs through the cloud-based analytics and optimization tools, while at the same time providing companies access to real-time data across various operational metrics.

Before its deal with Microsoft, Cloudyn has already raised more than $20 million, including an $11 million that being raised in 2015 funding round. Cloudyns big-name customers include Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Ticketmaster.

Like many of the software giants recent acquisitions and deals, Cloudyn is no longer new to Microsofts software and cloud technology, the two have already worked as technology partners with Microsofts Azure cloud computing service. In addition to Microsoft Azure, Cloudyns technology also works across other major cloud computing platforms, these include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google.

Since taking over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the India-born Satya Nadella has led a massive push in the cloud computing arena. The 49-years-old Indian-American business executive was a former head of the software giants cloud and enterprise division before rising to CEO position, thats why this cloud refocused mission has no longer come as a big surprise to everyone.

Microsoft is no longer stranger when it comes to Israel tech space. The software giant has already acquired several small, laser-focused Israeli-based companies, and most of them in the enterprise security space. These include Israeli-based security specialists Adallom, Aorato and Secure Islands. Earlier this month, it acquired another security specialist, the security intelligence firm Hexadite for $100 million.

Unfortunately, Microsoft isnt alone in boosting its cloud computing business through strategic acquisitions and partnerships. Rival companies, like IBM and Google, are also on the hunt. In 2015, IBM made some huge acquisitions, acquiring private cloud provider Bluebox and cloud management firm Gravitant.

Last year, archrival Google acquired an API management and predictive analytics Apegee for its Google Cloud Platform. And earlier this year, it acquired the San Franciso-based data science firm Kaggle.

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Microsoft confirms latest addition to its cloud computing service Azure - Blasting News

The Microsoft case has been less headline-grabbing than Googles news-dominating mega-fine this week, but it is the far more important case of the two. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

A week may be a long time in politics, but in business, just five days has been time enough for two developments that will worry many tech multinationals with European Union operations.

First came the US department of justice (DOJ) decision late last week to request the US supreme court hear an appeal in the internationally significant Microsoft Dublin email case.

Then, early this week, the European Commission smacked an extraordinary 2.4 billion fine onGoogle, having determined, after a seven-year investigation, that it had violated EU anti-trust laws by using a dominant position in the search market to favour its own shopping listings service.

The two cases are different in scope and implication, but both will fray nerves in boardrooms and executive suites worldwide.

The Microsoft case has been less headline-grabbing than Googles news-dominating mega-fine this week, but it is the far more important and potentially devastating case of the two.

Thats because while the Google decision may restrict how some internet-based businesses operate across the EU, the Microsoft case, if overturned by the US supreme court, would devastate one of the fastest-growing areas of business cloud computing undermining the foundation for how data is stored and handled.

Because most businesses worldwide rely on at least some international handling of data, this exposes Business with a capital B, not just the tech or internet-based sectors.

The case involves a judges demand that Microsoft hand over emails held in Ireland for a New York state case. Microsoft refused. But importantly, it has not fought compliance with lawful government requests, but rather how this particular one was made: without going through existing international agreements by which US authorities would normally request permission from and work with Irish authorities to access the emails.

The US has argued that Microsoft is an American company, giving US courts the right to directly demand the emails, regardless of where they are held. However, this is misleading. First, the US is trying to treat digital data as a different category of evidence. If the desired evidence were concrete (say, paper documents) rather than digital, US authorities would have to use existing international law-enforcement agreements. Digital is, wrongly, a legislative grey area.

Second, as Microsoft president and chief counsel Brad Smith argued in a blog post last week, if the US government has the right to directly seize internationally-held data, then other countries will of course, expect the same right to in effect conduct international digital raids for American or other nations data, in the US or around the world, with near-impunity.

This raises obvious data-protection, data-privacy, and surveillance concerns. It also completely undermines the whole concept of cloud computing the movement and storing of data by organisations in international jurisdictions and suggests businesses would have to run stand-alone operations and data centres in every geography in which they operate.

Having the supreme court hear this case would be a pointless waste of the courts time. As Smith notes, US legislators already accept that fresh legislation is needed to clarify and better streamline access to digital evidence. In the US, bipartisan efforts have begun in this regard.

A supreme court ruling could curtail or prematurely affect needed legislation. Hence, the DOJ referral request is unneeded and potentially catastrophic.

As for the Google case, the writing was on the wall for this decision for some time, as the company had failed in several attempts to reach a settlement with the EU over those seven years. The decision is likely to have a number of impacts.

First, it signals the EU is willing to make business-affecting decisions, backed with gasp-inducing fines, against multinationals seen to compete unfairly in areas of market dominance. And keep in mind the EU competition commissioner still has two ongoing investigations into other areas of Google business, its Android mobile operating system and its Ad Sense online advertising.

Overall (and without knowing yet the details of the judgement), the EU is showing it will closely examine and regulate competition in market verticals. Many other market-dominating companies in such verticals Amazon, for example, or Apple must be nervous.

The willingness to impose major fines is a sharp shock, too. For years, EU actions have been seen as minor swats, not big wallops. Big fines will certainly focus corporate minds.

Finally, the EU, interestingly, is moving firmly into an anti-trust watchdog role the US has only dithered in for the two decades since the DOJ went after Microsoft on anti-trust grounds (using Windows to shoehorn its Internet Explorer browser on to desktops). The US abandoned its own anti-trust investigation of Google two years ago.

And that, of course, is an historical connecting thread in the two current cases.

Google says it may appeal the EU decision. Microsoft, when under further anti-trust investigation in the EU in past years, eventually decided the best, business-stabilising approach was to settle with the EU.

But these days Microsoft has led corporate efforts to confront the US government on over-reaching data access.

An interesting turn of affairs, indeed.

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US action on Microsoft email case could devastate cloud computing - Irish Times

Microsoft and Box, which builds on-demand file storage and sharing tools, will work on new links between their products and jointly sell some tools.

Seattle Times technology reporter

Microsoft and file-storage startup Box have signed a deal to sell each others products, the latest blurring of the lines between friends and rivals in the growing business of cloud-computing.

Box builds web-based file storage and management tools, services that compete head-to-head with Microsofts own OneDrive and Sharepoint.

Despite that rivalry, the companies have agreed to jointly sell Box services and elements of Microsofts Azure cloud-computing platform, they said on Tuesday.

The companies say their engineering teams are also working on building more links between their products, including adding Azure to the Box Zones program. That effort lets Box customers opt to store their content in specific areas of Azures massive global network of data centers. (Box Zones already includes Azure rivals Amazon Web Services and IBM).

Cloud-computing has made some partnerships that would have seemed bizarre in the world of out-of-the-box business software of a generation ago. Microsoft, during its dominance of the personal computer heyday, developed a reputation for pushing customers to use its range of products at all costs, and shunning those developed by others.

But as the company prioritizes growth in its Azure cloud-computing platform, which enables other companies to build services on Microsofts network of data centers and rented software services, the Redmond firm has abandoned some of its scorched earth tactics. The company, analysts say, is betting that customers who plug into the cloud will demand that the products they use work well with those of other technology vendors.

Box, based in Redwood City, Calif., began as a startup founded by a pair of college students in Mercer Island. The company is among a slate of startups born in the cloud era that has thrived by building on-demand, web-based tools that replicate or improve on programs companies used to run from their own servers. Box held an initial public offering in 2015, and had sales of $425 million during the most recent 12-month period.

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Microsoft signs cloud-computing partnership with Box - The Seattle Times

Trainer Chad Brown sent out a number of graded stakes winners to work on Belmont Park's main track June 25.

Klaravich Stables and William Lawrence's grade 1 winner Practical Joke breezed four furlongsin :48.09 as he gears up for the $400,000 Dwyer Stakes (G3) July 8.

The Into Mischief colt, who will make his first start in the Dwyer since a fifth-place run in the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (G1), seeks his first win of his 3-year-old campaignafter runner-up efforts in the Xpressbet Fountain of Youth Stakes and Toyota Blue Grass Stakes (both G2).

"He breezed and continues to train very well ahead of the Dwyer," Brown said.

Preakness Stakes (G1) winner Cloud Computing also put in a maintenance work Sunday, breezingfour furlongs in :49.49. It was his second work since winning the second leg of the Triple Crown May 20. Also owned by Klaravich and Lawrence, Cloud Computing is training toward the $600,000 Jim Dandy Stakes (G2)July 29 at Saratoga Race Course.

Grade 1 winners Lady Eli and Antonoe breezed in company and covered four furlongs in :49.42. Lady Eli, who most recently won the Gamely Stakes (G1) at Santa Anita Park, is slated to make her next start on Saratoga's opening weekend in the $500,000 Diana Stakes (G1T).

Brown said Antonoe, fresh off her win in the Longines Just a Game Stakes (G1T)June 10, is also a possibility for the Diana.

"They went together. They're a good team and we're happy with both of them," Brown said.

Don Alberto Stable'sRubilinda, the first U.S. winner for 10-time group 1 winner Frankel, was scratched from the June 24 Wild Applause Stakes after the race was moved off the turf.

"It puts me in a bad spot. I likely now will have to go on to an allowance race and if she does well, then on to a stakes race," Brown said. "I'd like to run her (at Belmont)if I could."

Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf (G1T) winnerNew Money Honey and grade 3 winnerFifty Fivetwo of the four expected Brown entrants for the $1 million Belmont Oaks Invitational (G1T) July 8are expected to breeze on the turf June 26 at Belmont.

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Lady Eli, Cloud Computing Among Workers for Brown | BloodHorse ... - BloodHorse.com (press release) (registration) (blog)