Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 260 posts

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#121

Post by moksly »

sgt101 wrote: post #69
moksly wrote: post #7

I work for a Danish municipality with roughly 10,000 employees. I’m not sure if you know, but our public sector has been competing with Estonia at being the most digitised in the world for a decade. We operate an estimated 300-500 different IT-systems, some of them enterprise sized SAP solutions deployed on old IBM mainframes with multiple layers of APIs to make their fronts somewhat web-based (don’t ask). Others are…

Errm. "Estimated" 300-500 systems? I worked at a corporate with (at one point) 1891 systems; we had several ways of counting them... Some ways said 44 ( business platforms) But count them we could! If I was your CIO counting would be my number one mission!

The m not sure why this was downvoted. I think it’s correct and I think we could save a lot of money by collecting this knowledge. I say this, because I’ve witnessed departments where the managers of two teams in the same building had bought two different info-screen display systems. You could literally walk twenty meters and see two different info-displays. Both with hefty expenses, and both completely unnecessary because we have a centralised into system they can use for free, that they just didn’t know about.

Gathering this information and centralising the decision making to make sure things like duplicates don’t happen isn’t on our political agenda however. In fact the political agenda is quite the opposite, favouring even more decentralisation. At least right now. I mean, you say CIO like that’s something we should have, we don’t. We’re 10 techies to run those 300-500 systems, develop our own, navigate the national strategies, implement and manage our national it architecture Rammearkitekturen and support those 10,000 employees. ;)

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#122

Post by lotsofpulp »

adev_ wrote: post #104
ptd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One point(though I will admit this is the cynical part of my brain speaking) immediately jumps to mind. If the server goes down, you can blame Microsoft. Even the least technical person can’t blame you for that. If you create your own data center however, if it goes down, you may potentially be on the chopping block if service is interrupted. Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a busines…

> Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a business environment. And it's the most bullshit one. Outsourcing the risk does not mean avoiding it, it means however putting it out of control. This is a typical manager bullshit attitude "nobody got fired to buy IBM" that generally lead to adopt unadapted, bloated, overpriced solutions to trivial problems. Just because they do not have the balls…

Bullshit means something is not true. People choosing to go with a vendor to avoid the risk of being blamed for failure, thereby reducing their chances of being fired, is a true phenomenon. And one that works. So how is it bullshit?

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#123

Post by dx034 »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #91
polskibus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this scale, why not invest in your own datacenter, since you already have a lot of servers to maintain? I understand you have to use Office 365, but what is the value prop of Azure to you beyond that ?

I say this as someone who used to firmly agree with this position, but in the last year my mind has been changed without reservation. The time where this was a good idea has genuinely passed. There is no earthly way that any reasonable organization will be able to provide even the security that is present by relying on a large-scale cloud provider. There is no way they will come out on top money-wise either. The big…

Maybe not own dc, but colocation could still make sense? You don't need to be more efficient than Azure & Co. They have pretty solid profit margins, even being 30% less efficient should still be cheaper for you. And beyond a few thousand servers, I'm not even sure if scale matters that much (for server virtualization only).

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#124

Post by dx034 »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #99
addicted wrote: post #22

I think everyone here is missing the real reason why big companies want to go with Azure (and smaller companies probably should consider too). No one trusts Amazon to not screw them over. The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. MS has a long history of being a provider…

> The A to Z in the Amazon logo hurts AWS because big companies are worried Amazon will compete with them (if they don’t already) and will use AWS data and information against those companies. This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make…

They don't need to look at customer data to get valuable insights. Information on bandwidth, used services, accounts and billing alone will probably get you good insight into non-public information on the business. And Amazon is very well allowed to look at this data.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#125

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #59
polskibus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about CRM, messaging, analytics, BI, etc.? Some time ago they released a beta (?) of invoicing product - not sure how that went.

I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients. These are all tool makers and basically competitors. And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.

They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...).

Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history.

Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course.

They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#126

Post by samsonradu »

antupis wrote: post #4

Is this because of AD and Office integrations?

Could also be due to the fact that Amazon might become a competitor in the future. Take the banking/finance sector, it might not expect competition from Microsoft, while Amazon could decide to enter the market, having a much more 'entrepreneurial' spirit.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#127

Post by laurentb »

scarface74 wrote: post #114
laurentb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to look that deep to see the example. Walmart categorically refuses to buy anything that runs on Amazon simply because amazon competes with walmart directly in retail. having said that, i'm sure there are exceptions and some examples where they do have some stuff they use hosted on aws but that's the exception not the norm.

But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists. Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.

They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples. However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#128

Post by laurentb »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #125
thawaway1837 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they crush competitors. Not so much partners and clients. These are all tool makers and basically competitors. And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.

They ran Skype into the ground by compromising on the quality of the end user-experience - just like they did with MSN Messenger - and the current desktop Skype client is an Electron app (at least this way Linux still gets supported...). Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Ha…

It's only a personal opinion, but I find that Teams has a much better product than Slack and a much better vision of integrations than slack does.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#129

Post by vidarh »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #91
polskibus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this scale, why not invest in your own datacenter, since you already have a lot of servers to maintain? I understand you have to use Office 365, but what is the value prop of Azure to you beyond that ?

I say this as someone who used to firmly agree with this position, but in the last year my mind has been changed without reservation. The time where this was a good idea has genuinely passed. There is no earthly way that any reasonable organization will be able to provide even the security that is present by relying on a large-scale cloud provider. There is no way they will come out on top money-wise either. The big…

I have literally never seen a setup where cloud came out less than ~twice the cost of dedicated hosting. I have seen instances where dedicated hosting comes out cheaper than putting your own equipment in a colo, but even that depends on being in a location where energy and property prices (and so colo rental costs) are high.

And this does factor in devops - when doing consulting I earned consistently more (because of more hours) from clients that went for cloud setups; often they'd end up spending more times solving problems that generally didn't exist in the first place in a dedicated setup.

I do see lots of people that keep assuming that the cloud players must be cheap because they're so big, but I just have never seen that bear out in practice - in part because of that attitude, the margins they can charge are far higher.

Cloud providers are great for ease and for the number of services they provide, but they are generally an expensive step up.

Re: Azure has an edge over AWS at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says

#130

Post by scarface74 »

laurentb wrote: post #127
scarface74 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But yet Netflix is all in on Amazon even though Amazon Prime Video exists. Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.

They do, and in some cases or exceptions they bypass whatever internal rule they imposed on themselves just like your examples. However, whether it's Amazon or another, it doesn't change the fact that businesses are in general averse to do business with a company that has shown in the past that it will enter a new market if it sees money in it at the cost of its partner relationship.

How many software companies have refused to run Windows because MS competes with them? How many OEMs went all in on Linux when MS started selling Surface computers?
Post reply on HN