Rackspace CEO: Offshoring, real estate closures and other cost cutting measures. Did NASDAQ cheer? Well? Nope There are two things that typically make Wall Street investment analysts go weak at the knees when it comes to quarterly conference calls with tech execs: expanding cloud services and gory details of cost pruning. Rackspace delivered both in spades this week but its shares nonetheless took a beating on NASDAQ, plunging by …
So analysts were expecting more ($1.10), Rackspace delivered $1 yet shares drop by 30%.
Just what the hell is wrong with these people. Unless I am missing something significant, revenues were up, earnings per share were close to expectations so why dump unless it is to then buy back at the lower price?
"Rackspace reported a fall in gross margin due to the cloud mix, the early costs of on-boarding of customers and a few other aspects. This, along with operating costs and interest repayments, led to a net loss of $64m versus a net loss of $48.2m a year earlier."
It was buried further in the article.
It's nothing but growth and percentages of growth throughout.
If you take the transcript at face value, in every single category they mention it's year-on-year growth. Just growing like crazy.
Even their financial department apparently improved the cashflow. I wonder how beancounters can improve cashflow. I though it was sales people and the grunts on the ground that improved cashflow by working more deals, but no. Maybe they invested a lot in BitCoin and made out like bandits ?
In any case, there is absolutely no explanation whatsoever for delivering $1 instead of $1.10. Reading that blurg, they should have delivered $1.50.
It's all malarky anyway.
Tencent Cloud has released an odd robot-adjacent device designed to provide telemedicine services.
The effort is called i-Care and is the result of a tie up with USA-based IT services Millennium Technology Services (MTS)'s subsidiary Invincible Technology. The two companies set out to create "a digital solution that aims to improve patients' experience and quality of life as well as draw patients, families and caregivers closer than ever."
"Customers' habits and expectations have evolved dramatically over the last few years across various industries including the medical and healthcare field, driven by the further emergence of digital technologies and cloud computing," said Tencent Cloud in a canned statement.
Microsoft has indefinitely postponed the date on which its Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) will be required to sell software and services licences on new terms.
Those new terms are delivered under the banner of the New Commerce Experience (NCE). NCE is intended to make perpetual licences a thing of the past and prioritizes fixed-term subscriptions to cloudy products. Paying month-to-month is more expensive than signing up for longer-term deals under NCE, which also packs substantial price rises for many Microsoft products.
Channel-centric analyst firm Canalys unsurprisingly rates NCE as better for Microsoft than for customers or partners.
The world's server market will grow in 2022 – but more slowly than in the past – and could dip further, according to analyst firm TrendForce.
Supply chain issues are, unsurprisingly, one reason for predicted modest growth. Shanghai's COVID lockdowns, for example, mean China's server makers have struggled to open, and get the parts they need.
The likes of Dell and HPE were hurt by those lockdowns, but TrendForce feels they'll recover.
IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.
Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."
The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.
VMware today revealed details about Project Arctic, the vSphere-as-a-service offering it teased in late 2021, though it won't discuss pricing for another month.
VMware's thinking starts with the fact that organizations are likely to run multiple instances of its vSphere and VSAN products, often in multiple locations. Managing them all centrally is not easy.
Enter vSphere+ and VSAN+, which run in the cloud and can control multiple on-premises instances of vSphere or VSAN. To make that possible, users will need to adopt the Cloud Gateway, which connects vSphere instances to a Cloud Console.
Updated Hitachi has taken a modest step towards becoming a public cloud provider, with the launch of a VMware-powered cloud in Japan that The Register understands may not be its only such venture.
The Japanese giant has styled the service a "sovereign cloud" – a term that VMware introduced to distinguish some of its 4,000-plus partners that operate small clouds and can attest to their operations being subject to privacy laws and governance structures within the nation in which they operate.
Public cloud heavyweights AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba also offer VMware-powered clouds, at hyperscale. But some organizations worry that their US or Chinese roots make them vulnerable to laws that might allow Washington or Beijing to exercise extraterritorial oversight.
Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has announced what it claims is the first "cloud laptop" – an Android-powered device that the consumes just five watts and links to its cloud desktop-as-a-service.
Announced this week at the partially state-owned company's 2022 Cloud Network Ecosystem Summit, the machine – model W600D – measures 325mm × 215mm × 14 mm, weighs 1.1kg and includes a 14-inch HD display, full-size keyboard, HD camera, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. An unspecified eight-core processors drives it, and a 40.42 watt-hour battery is claimed to last for eight hours.
It seems the primary purpose of this thing is to access a cloud-hosted remote desktop in which you do all or most of your work. ZTE claimed its home-grown RAP protocol ensures these remote desktops will be usable even on connections of a mere 128Kbit/sec, or with latency of 300ms and packet loss of six percent. That's quite a brag.
Amazon at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Thursday announced a preview of an automated programming assistance tool called CodeWhisperer.
Available to those who have obtained an invitation through the AWS IDE Toolkit, a plugin for code editors to assist with writing AWS applications, CodeWhisperer is Amazon's answer to GitHub Copilot, an AI (machine learning-based) code generation extension that entered general availability earlier this week.
In a blog post, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, said the goal of CodeWhisperer is to make software developers more productive.
Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.
Snappily dubbed OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the service was launched in 2020 and promised to run a private cloud inside a customer's datacenter, or one run by a third party. Paid for "as-a-service," the concept promised customers the flexibility of moving workloads seamlessly between the on-prem system and Oracle's public cloud for a $6 million annual fee and a minimum commitment of three years.
Big Red has now slashed the fee for a scaled-down version of its on-prem cloud to $1 million a year for a minimum period of four years.
Mega, the New Zealand-based file-sharing biz co-founded a decade ago by Kim Dotcom, promotes its "privacy by design" and user-controlled encryption keys to claim that data stored on Mega's servers can only be accessed by customers, even if its main system is taken over by law enforcement or others.
The design of the service, however, falls short of that promise thanks to poorly implemented encryption. Cryptography experts at ETH Zurich in Switzerland on Tuesday published a paper describing five possible attacks that can compromise the confidentiality of users' files.
The paper [PDF], titled "Mega: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry," by ETH cryptography researchers Matilda Backendal and Miro Haller, and computer science professor Kenneth Paterson, identifies "significant shortcomings in Mega’s cryptographic architecture" that allow Mega, or those able to mount a TLS MITM attack on Mega's client software, to access user files.
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