Monthly Archives: July 2020

Over the last decade, cloud computing has been a top-performing investment theme. But it's been this current health and economic crisis that has proven just how important cloud services are. With businesses and consumers grappling with shelter-in-place orders, it's these digital systems that have played a crucial role in keeping the wheels turning.

Thus, I think the winds filling the cloud computing industry's sails are far from abating. Global spending was expected to be a double-digit percentage growth story before coronavirus, and the pandemic is only increasing demand, making cloud stocks an annual spending opportunity now totaling in the hundreds of billions. I like cloud stocks as the 2020s get under way. Three I own already and that I'm looking to buy more of in July are salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), CrowdStrike Holdings (NASDAQ:CRWD), and Anaplan (NYSE:PLAN).

Salesforce has gone from a specialized customer relationship management software-as-a-service to a massive ecosystem of services centered around relationships. In this digital age, human interaction can get downright impersonal. But Salesforce is doing its part to prevent that as far as business and customer relationships are concerned.

Sure, the whole business model springs from digital data. Salesforce prides itself on delivering actionable insights to organizations based on information gathered from their customers. But through dozens of acquisitions and internal development, the company's platform has become a torchbearer for digital transformation that puts customers first.

The company has kicked its efforts into overdrive during the current lockdown. It announced a new chat and video tool embedded directly in its software, expanded its freelance advisor marketplace with Torchlite to help businesses manage the current business environment, partnered with Siemens (OTC:SIEG.Y) to create touchless office entry and workforce management systems, announced a new set of tools from subsidiary MuleSoft to help healthcare providers make better use of patient data, and invested $100 million in remote-work service technologist Tanium. Salesforce has been busy the last few months helping users of its platform make a quick pivot.

But why Salesforce stock right now? After all, the company did forecast a slowdown in revenue growth for this year, with guidance for revenue implying the company will dip below a 20% year-over-year growth rate (17% is the forecast) for the first time ever. Concerning? Maybe. But the fact that this massive cloud software company still expects to maintain double-digit percentage growth at all is notable. Plus, it has a habit of under-promising and over-delivering. Either way, after the last quarterly update, there was more than enough positive in the report to keep me optimistic about Salesforce's prospects over the next decade.

Image source: Getty Images.

Endpoint security is nothing new. Whenever there is a connection between a network and a device, a potential pathway that can be exploited by those with nefarious intent is opened. Traditionally, that pathway could be closed as many organizations restricted access to their systems from within an office building. With many companies migrating operations to a remote cloud over the last decade, a new form of security that also dwells in the cloud was necessary to secure endpoints accessing the network.

But then COVID-19 happened, and the workforce suddenly got dispersed to millions of homes. It's been a not-so-proverbial torpedo into the side of traditional security thinking. With so many people now accessing networks and workflows from a home internet connection and device, cloud cybersecurity has become essential. CrowdStrike, which was already benefiting from the migration before, has skyrocketed. According to a report from tech researcher IDC, CrowdStrike's cut of market share nearly doubled in the last two years while the three largest incumbents' slices of the pie shrank.

Specifically, the company's revenue surged 85% higher in Q1 2020 to $178 million, and sees full-year revenue of $761 million to $773 million (about a 59% increase from 2019). In a very short period, this has turned into one of the largest cybersecurity pure-plays around, and it has tremendous momentum on its side as legacy vendors were still trying to adapt to changing times before.

Even when using expected one-year forward results, this stock trades for a very expensive 22.8 times revenue. But besides torrid growth, a premium is warranted. This is a highly profitable outfit with free cash flow (revenue less cash operating and capital expenses) margin coming in at 49% during the first quarter. It's more than likely that margin will moderate later this year, but it nonetheless speaks to how powerful and lucrative a business model subscription-based cloud computing can be.

CrowdStrike is one of those companies getting a huge bump from the state of current world affairs. But much like Salesforce, many cloud companies are reporting an expected pause in spending among customers, albeit a temporary one. Anaplan is one of those cloud vendors forecasting some bumps ahead.

The company is a pioneer in the "Connected Planning" industry, as it tries to disrupt offerings from old software vendors like IBM (NYSE:IBM), Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), and SAP (NYSE:SAP), and also has some overlap with services offered by larger peer Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY). But it's a big segment of the software field, and Anaplan is attacking it with its cloud-native and artificially intelligent software that stitches together all the data an organization possesses to help drive better decision making.

After expanding 45% in 2019, its Q1 2020 got off to a much more sluggish start. Revenue increased 37% to $104 million, management pulled the plug on full-year 2020 expectations due to lack of visibility on closing of new deals, and second-quarter guidance is calling for "only" 22% year-over-year growth.

On one hand, a slowdown is to be expected given the belt-tightening going on at the moment. But it nonetheless speaks to Anaplan's positioning that it can keep momentum going even amid crisis. I for one think corporate planning will be in higher demand than ever as effects from the pandemic begin to slowly ease. Whether it's sales, budgeting, or special project forecasting, Anaplan's ability to help teams in different departments across an organization -- and in remote locations -- work together rather than in individual silos will be an important feature post-coronavirus. Shares trade for 12.2 times one-year forward revenue -- hardly cheap, but not unreasonable given the billions of dollars spent on planning software each year.

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3 Top Cloud Computing Stocks to Buy in July - The Motley Fool

Leading universities and major technology companies agreed on Tuesday to back a new project intended to give academics and other scientists access to the computing resources now available mainly to a few tech giants.

The initiative, the National Research Cloud, has received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Lawmakers in both houses have proposed bills that would create a task force of government science leaders, academics and industry representatives to outline a plan to create and fund a national research cloud.

This program would give academic scientists access to the cloud data centers of the tech giants, and to public data sets for research.

Several universities, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State, and tech companies including Google, Amazon and IBM backed the idea as well on Tuesday. The organizations declared their support for the creation of a research cloud and their willingness to participate in the project.

The research cloud, though a conceptual blueprint at this stage, is another sign of the largely effective campaign by universities and tech companies to persuade the American government to increase government backing for research into artificial intelligence. The Trump administration, while cutting research elsewhere, has proposed doubling federal spending on A.I. research by 2022.

Fueling the increased government backing is the recognition that A.I. technology is essential to national security and economic competitiveness. The national cloud legislation will be proposed as an amendment to this years defense budget authorization.

We have a real challenge in our country from China in terms of what they are doing with A.I., said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, a sponsor of the bill.

Funding for the project, the terms for paying the cloud providers and what data might be available would be up to the task force and Congress.

This is a logical first step, said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, another sponsor of the proposed law. The task force is going to have to grapple with how you pay for it and how you govern it. But you shouldnt have to work at Google to have access to this technology.

The national research cloud would address a problem that is a byproduct of impressive progress in recent years. The striking gains made in tasks like language understanding, computer vision, game playing and common-sense reasoning have been attained thanks to a branch of A.I. called deep learning.

That technology increasingly requires immense computing firepower. A report last year from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, working with data from OpenAI, another artificial intelligence lab, observed that the volume of calculations needed to be a leader in advanced A.I. had soared an estimated 300,000 times in the previous six years. The cost of training deep learning models, cycling endlessly through troves of data, can be millions of dollars.

The cost and need for vast computing resources are putting some cutting-edge A.I. research beyond the reach of academics. Only the tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can spend billions a year on data centers that are often the size of a football field, housing rack upon rack with hundreds of thousands of computers.

So there has been a brain drain of computer scientists from universities to the big tech companies, lured by access to their cloud data centers as well as lucrative pay packages. The worry is that academic research the seed corn of future breakthroughs is being shortchanged.

Academic work can be crucial particularly in areas where profits are not on the immediate horizon. That was the story with deep learning, which dates to the 1980s. A small band of academics nurtured the field for years. Only since 2012, with enough computing power and data, did deep learning really take off.

There have been smaller efforts for university research to tap into the big tech clouds. But the current concept of an ambitious public-private partnership for a National Research Cloud came in March from John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li, co-directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

They posted their idea online and sought support from other universities. The academics then promoted the idea to their political representatives and industry contacts.

The federal government has long backed major research projects like particle accelerators for high-energy physics in the 1960s and supercomputing centers in the 1980s.

But in the past, the government built the labs and facilities. The research cloud would use the cloud factories of the tech companies. Academic scientists would be government-subsidized customers of the tech giants, perhaps at rates below those charged to their business customers.

Many university researchers say that buying rather than building is the only sensible path, given the daunting cost of hyper-scale data centers.

We need to get scientific research on the public cloud, said Ed Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington. We have to hitch ourselves to that wagon. Its the only way to keep up.

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Universities and Tech Giants Back National Cloud Computing Project - The New York Times

AWS Ground Station makes use of satellite ground stations. (AWS Photo)

Amazon Web Services today unveiled a new business unit devoted to developing data infrastructure and cloud services for the aerospace and satellite industry and headed by someone who helped set up the U.S. Space Force.

The Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business segment will be headed by retired Air Force Major Gen. Clint Crosier, former director of Space Force Planning.

We find ourselves in the most exciting time in space since the Apollo missions, Crosier said in todays announcement from Amazon. I have watched AWS transform the IT industry over the last 10 years and be instrumental in so many space milestones. I am honored to join AWS to continue to transform the industry and propel the space enterprise forward.

The unveiling was announced by Teresa Carlson at the AWS Public Sector Summit Online. Whether on Earth or in space, AWS is committed to understanding our customers missions, she said.

Amazon Web Services started down the road to space-centric cloud computing a year and a half ago when it established AWS Ground Station, a cloud service designed for satellite owners and operators.

AWS Ground Station has been building up a network of literal ground stations for satellite communications, as well as a portfolio of customers ranging from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Capella Space, a provider of on-demand satellite radar imagery. Today AWS highlighted Capellas move to go all-in on its infrastructure, including AWS Ground Station as well as ground-based cloud services.

We are redefining what is possible in the satellite industry, and reducing the cost and time required for organizations to benefit from satellite data, Capella CEO Payam Banazadeh said in a news release.

Walter Scott, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Maxar Technologies, said AWS is providing the foundational building blocks for its satellite data system.

This new AWS business will support Maxar as we launch our new WorldView Legion satellites next year, which will triple our 30-cm imagery collection and greatly increase our currency and scalability for government missions and commercial use cases, Scott said.

AWS Carlson said the world is entering an exciting and daring new age in space, highlighted by initiatives including space-based IoT and Earth observation services, low-latency satellite internet services and NASAs Artemis campaign to send astronauts to the moon.

She promised that the new aerospace and satellite business unit would work with customers and partners to reimagine space system architectures and launch new services that process space data on Earth and in orbit.

Amazon and its billionaire founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, have a couple of other ventures in the works to capitalize on the final frontier.

Last year, Amazon revealed that its working on a venture called Project Kuiper that aims to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit to provide global internet access. Then theres Blue Origin, Bezos privately held space venture, which is developing a suborbital spaceship called New Shepard, an orbital-class rocket called New Glenn and a lunar lander called Blue Moon.

For now, AWS new business segment supports Project Kuiper and Blue Origin as customers, just as Amazon.com is treated as a customer. Looking longer-term, those efforts have additional potential for two-way synergy, with Kuiper conceivably providing satellite resources for cloud services and communication, and Blue Origin providing the means to get that hardware into space.

Competitors to AWS space force would include SpaceX, which already has hundreds of satellites in orbit for its Starlink broadband data network; and Microsofts Azure cloud computing platform, which has been working on space-related services with partners including NASA and SES, one of the worlds top satellite network operators.

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Amazon Web Services is creating its very own space force for cloud computing - GeekWire

For every manager and business owner who is not familiar with cloud computing technology, the concept of shifting their business to the cloud is likely to be daunting!

Many companies fear that storing their data on a cloud platform could be less secure as compared to file storage and on-site data. Some also think that it could be an expensive affair to make the transition or a time-consuming task that will halt their business operations.

But this cannot be further from the truth!

In fact, businesses that have already moved to the cloud are reaping numerous benefits like increased security and enhanced productivity. Studies suggest that nearly 74% of companies think that the cloud had a positive impact on their company.

It is possible that your business is already leveraging the cloud computing technology, although you are not sure what it actually does.

For instance, when youre checking your bank account on the mobile device, you are technically using cloud-based ERP systems. Similarly, when you make changes to your social media accounts, you are in the cloud.

If you have various apps to handle your business operations, your company has perhaps already transitioned to cloud computing.

Since no one knows your business better than you do, it is completely up to you to decide whether or not you need to move to the cloud. But one thing is for sure - businesses not using cloud computing technology are slowly becoming a thing of the past!

Studies also suggest that over 93% of companies are already leveraging cloud technology.

These organizations have not transitioned to cloud computing because it is all the rage. They did it because of the myriad of benefits offered by the cloud ERP system. Here are the top six reasons why you should move to the cloud right away!

Many businesses have mentioned operational flexibility as the major reason why they moved their company to the cloud. As you grow your business, the bandwidth need also increases. The cloud computing technology helps you easily shoot up your storage capacity whenever you want to. Similarly, you also get to scale down with complete ease.

An unforeseen disaster can have a catastrophic impact on your business operations. Before the inception of cloud ERP solutions, investing in solid disaster recovery was frowned upon as an expensive affair. But with cloud computing technology, companies can easily execute a disaster recovery plan without huge investments.

When you leverage cloud computing, you ensure that your businesss servers are off-premises and handled by the provider. This means you get automatic and hassle-free security and software updates. It also lets you focus more on other essential business functions.

Shifting your company to the cloud technology completely removes the need for expensive investment on hardware and its maintenance. Using cloud computing, your business can select any of the payment options that is convenient to you.

When you transition to cloud computing, all your confidential data is in safe hands! This means even if you accidentally delete your data or endure a software crash, you still have complete access to the information. It also enables you to wipe out the unnecessary data to make sure its not compromised.

When using cloud computing solutions, you get full access to all the latest technologies that you could not use otherwise. Also since you will be leveraging technologies similar to the ones used by established and large-scale organizations, you get an upper hand over your competitors.

If your company has not yet moved to the cloud, it is high time that you do so!

Shifting to the cloud will only make your company more competitive and flexible, offer enhanced disaster recovery plans, safeguard your crucial data, and help you save hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

A robust cloud computing plan is one of the best ways to improve and grow your company. Another one is to collaborate with experienced suppliers.

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Cloud Computing - Why It's Time To Shift Your Business To The Cloud - CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The global healthcare cloud computing market size is expected to grow by USD 25.54 billion during 2020-2024. The report also provides the market impact and new opportunities created due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We expect the impact to be significant in the first quarter but gradually lessen in subsequent quarters with a limited impact on the full-year economic growth.

Request for Technavio's latest reports on directly and indirectly impacted marketsMarket estimates include pre- and post-COVID-19 impact on the healthcare cloud computing market -

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Research collaborations have increased in recent years, particularly in the field of healthcare. Healthcare establishments and organizations involved in research initiatives require systems with high computational capabilities. Deploying cloud computing in healthcare ecosystems offers various advantages, including cost savings, enhanced flexibility, and system scalability to the organizations. Furthermore, the use of cloud computing also facilitates better collaborative research among various healthcare researchers and other stakeholders. The cloud computing modules designed for the healthcare ecosystem helps healthcare professionals make precise decisions while prescribing appropriate medications to their patients. Thus, growing collaborations among different stakeholders of the healthcare industry will drive the healthcare cloud computing market.

To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR41148

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold with severe impact on people, communities, and businesses. Several industries are expected to be negatively impacted while various other markets may show promising growth. The health care and information technologies is one such sector, which is expected to witness a positive impact due to the global outbreak of COVID-19. With the healthcare industry showing positive signs, the global healthcare cloud computing market is expected to grow significantly during the next few years.

As per Technavio, the introduction of blockchain in cloud computing will have a positive impact on the market and contribute to its growth significantly over the forecast period. This research report also analyzes other significant trends and market drivers that will influence market growth over 2020-2024.

Healthcare Cloud Computing Market: Introduction of Blockchain in Cloud Computing

Rising deployment of cloud computing systems in the healthcare industry has increased data and information theft, resulting in cybersecurity issues. However, the implementation of blockchain in healthcare IT infrastructure will help in achieving greater data security, streamlining claims, managing the billing process, and ensuring integrity within the drug supply chain and health research. Also, blockchain-enabled systems reduce breaches during data exchange and offer greater ownership to patients with respect to their personal data and health records. As a result, with the growing awareness of the benefits provided by blockchain technology, vendors in the healthcare industry are collaborating with cloud computing companies to develop blockchain-based healthcare management systems.

Introduction of edge computing, integrated service offerings for the healthcare industry, and development of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) are a few other factors that will boost market growth during the forecast period, says a senior analyst at Technavio.

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Healthcare Cloud Computing Market: Segmentation Analysis

This market research report segments the healthcare cloud computing market by product (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) and geographic landscape (North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and MEA).

The North American region led the healthcare cloud computing market in 2019, followed by Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA respectively. During the forecast period, the North American region is expected to register the highest incremental growth due to factors such as the increasing adoption of cloud computing by healthcare institutes, and the increasing launch of various cloud computing products.

Technavios sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report, such as the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more. Request a free sample report

Some of the key topics covered in the report include:

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Trends

Vendor Landscape

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavios report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavios comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

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COVID-19 Impact and Recovery Analysis- Global Healthcare Cloud Computing Market 2020-2024| Increasing Cloud Assisted Medical Collaborations to Boost...

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Simply put, 'cloud' refers to the Internet, and cloud computing means saving your files and all your data, accessing applications or programs over the Internet instead of using local storage. Local storage or computing is saving your data on or running programs from your computers hard drive. In the past, people ran programs through software downloaded onto their computers. Cloud computing allows people to access these programs over the Internet without having to install them.

The word cloud was used to describe how engineers typically illustrated the Internet in diagrams that map out components of their networks. In previous years, engineers used a cloud symbol in old diagrams to depict this complex system all their computers were connected to thats located off-site or beyond their premises.

For businesses cloud computing means accessing computing services like data back-up and storage, server management, software hosting, disaster and recovery, analytics, among many others over the Internet.

Many organizations use cloud technology because it allows them to save a lot of money and other resources. With this technology, companies no longer need to build their own IT infrastructure on-site. They dont need to set-up, run, and maintain data centers. They dont have to buy racks of servers, expensive hardware, and software or pay for 24-hour electricity and cooling to keep servers working properly. On top of all these, they no longer need to maintain a team of IT personnel to manage the infrastructure on-site.

It saves the company even more since they dont have to invest in having physical space for servers. Cloud computing is also more flexible. It can be scaled up or down depending on the companys needs and they only pay for what they use. Simply put, they can just plug in and pay for a monthly subscription.

Cloud providers also offer customers advanced security features with a broad set of technologies and control to protect data from breaches and other threats. They provide added security measures to maintain cloud data protection and guard against unauthorized access, especially to sensitive information like clients payment data (credit card information, bank accounts), personal information (social security numbers, home addresses, phone numbers), health information (diagnoses, treatments), and other confidential data like financial records, business plans, or source codes among others.

Resources in the cloud can also be easily accessed from anywhere in the world. Companies and their staff can access, store, retrieve, or recover resources 24/7 while on the go even by using mobile devices. It is especially useful for companies with remote staff working from different parts of the world. It gives employees access to resources even if they are scattered in different locations.

Another important feature of cloud technology is cloud backup and disaster recovery. Since data is one of if not the most valuable asset of many modern organizations, losing it can mean losing productivity, revenue, and customers. A disaster can be caused by an access breach as in the case of a cyber-attack, a fire, flood, typhoon, or snowstorm that may damage computers on-site, or simply human error like when one of your administrators accidentally deletes data. This is why you need a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan.

Cloud providers offer disaster recovery backup services also known as off-site disaster recovery that allow organizations to easily backup and restore, or retrieve data and applications in case of a disaster to continue their operations. These cloud services are often scalable which means companies have control over how little or how much data or applications they need to back up or how often data back-up should be done (does the company need continuous or scheduled back-up?).

There are different approaches to cloud backup and disaster recovery and a company can choose any based on their budget and needs. The most basic one involves backing up data to the cloud and then recovering it when a disaster occurs. Another much more expensive approach involves having your backup resources running at all times and putting these resources into use as soon as disaster strikes. A third more sophisticated approach is having backup resources running in the cloud at all times and having copies of this spread out in different locations of the cloud. This provides more instantaneous backup and recovery, which is also more secure because it allows companies to recover data quickly even if one cloud site has failed. Although the last one is a lot more expensive and is designed for bigger companies.

There are three main types of cloud computing: public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid. A public cloud refers to IT infrastructure not owned by a single end-user and is shared with many others. In essence, public cloud providers lease out partitioned and redistributed parts to multiple tenants (organizations). In this type, cloud computing services are shared with numerous customers although their work systems remain separate from one another, they just happen to share the same cloud infrastructure (physical machine or group of machines). This is the most cost-effective approach.

Private cloud refers to cloud computing services that cater to a single tenant or one end user only. This means an organization may choose not to maintain their data center on-site, but procure the services of a cloud provider to create private cloud IT infrastructure that can be used by their business only. This is the most secure cloud computing solution that is used by companies handling sensitive data.

Hybrid cloud, on the other hand, uses a combination of private and public cloud resources. This allows companies to move between private and public clouds depending on specific needs giving them more flexibility.

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What Is Cloud Computing? - World Atlas

The coronavirus has been responsible for widespread changes in the US economy. Consumer preferences have changed which has resulted in increased demand for certain industries. Cloud computing, which had been a niche industry, is slated to take center stage.

As more people have been working from home, there has been an increase in video conferencing, and distance education. This bodes well for cloud computing service providers since many individuals and companies will be shifting their work online. Large companies now require sophisticated cloud architectures to shift their data and software applications online.

Here are five cloud computing stocks expected to do well in the second half of 2020:

Amazon (AMZN)

With the spread of the pandemic, AMZN has received a boost not just to its core business of e-commerce, but also to its cloud computing services. In the first quarter of this year, AMZNs cloud computing segment AWS, brought in a record of $10 billion in revenue. That was a rise in revenue of 34.2% compared to the same period last year.

With cloud computing being increasingly important for the world, AMZN is well-poised to experience high growth in the sector. AMZN has a Strong Buy rating in the StockNews.com POWR Ratings. It is the #1 stock out of 52 Internet companies. AMZN has returned 55.79% so far year to date.

Alphabet (GOOGL)

GOOGL has not only benefited from an overall increase in web traffic, but its cloud computing service has been flying high as well. The companys first quarter gross revenue saw an increase of approximately 13%. In the same quarter, GOOGLs revenue from Google Cloud rose by 52%. Googles Cloud unit is now hiring faster than the rest of the company with expectations of faster growth.

GOOGL has returned 7.66% year to day. The stock has a Strong Buy rating in the POWR Ratings. It also has a Buy & Hold Grade of A. This measures the long-term bullish or bearishness of a stock.

Adobe (ADBE)

This may surprise some, but ADBE is a large player in the cloud computing space thanks to its Creative Cloud product. The company also offers Experience Cloud, which focuses on providing tools for marketing, advertising, analytics, and commerce.

Last month, ADBE released the Adobe Experience Manager as part of its Experience Cloud service. With a greater digital presence for many companies, the companys latest offering seeks to provide digital experience solutions.This could mean a larger share for Adobe in the overall cloud computing market.

ADBE has a year to date return of 33.35%. The stock has a Strong Buy rating in the POWR Ratings. It is also ranked #1 of out 82 stocks in Software Application industry.

Salesforce (CRM)

CRM is a dedicated cloud computing services provider that operates in six core segments: sales force automation, customer support, marketing automation, community management, analytics along with a cloud platform for building custom applications.

The company has announced a new mobile collaboration tool called Salesforce Anywhere. With more people working from home, there has never been a better market condition for this type of a tool.

CRM has returned 17.98% so far year to date. The stock has a Strong Buy rating in the POWR Ratings It also has A Grades in all four components that make up the POWR Ratings.

Splunk (SPLK)

SPLK is a cloud computing service provider that focuses on big data. It enables companies and organizations to monitor and analyze big data metrics from a range of sources. The company recently announced that Splunk Cloud will now be available through Google Cloud, adding to data sharing and analysis capabilities of its users. This move could spark greater adoption of Splunks cloud-based tools. SPLK cloud-specific sales grew 81% in its most recent quarterly which ended on April 30..

The stock has returned 35.95% so far this year. SPLK has a Strong Buy rating in the POWR Ratings It also has A Grades in all four components that make up the POWR Ratings.

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AMZN shares . Year-to-date, AMZN has gained 56.42%, versus a -1.99% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.

The StockNews Staff is led by a team of investment experts including CEO, Steve Reitmeister and trading legend Adam Mesh. The goal of our commentary is to provide you with valuable insights to make more successful investment decisions. More...

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AMZN: 5 Cloud Computing Stocks that are Expected to Outperform - StockNews.com

The Edge and the Cloud are the hot terms in data processing today, particularly for industries that are continuing to explore the benefits of the Industrial Internet of Things. These devices produce a huge amount of data about processes temperatures, pressures and the levels of liquids in a vessel, to name but a few. In the past, a lot of this data was left untended and un-utilized, with companies lacking the ability to easily analyze it or share it.

With the arrival of Edge computing and Cloud technologies, all this has changed. Bringing the combined benefits of greatly enhanced computing power and analytical capabilities, these technologies promise to allow users to fully unlock the possibilities of Industry 4.0. For industrial companies, the challenge now is to find the best way of using these technologies, either individually, or together, to facilitate the full exploitation and sharing of their device and systems data.

The essential difference is that the Edge is on premise it puts computing close to industrial systems. By contrast, the Cloud is served by data processing facilities based at a remote data center and provides essentially infinite computing. Which one to choose is highly dependent on a users applications and their environment, as well as their requirements around key issues such as security.

When it comes to the Edge, the fact that the computing power is placed near the very devices it serves creates one major obvious benefit it reduces latency, the time needed for data to travel from source to destination, meaning enhanced speeds are achieved.

Security is also an increasingly important industry focus. Many potential users will be concerned that Edge computing presents an easy way for hackers to gain entry to a plants network. They may feel that the attack surface is just too great. Yet, the other side of the coin is that the distributed nature of Edge computing means it is easier to seal off an affected device. Another advantage is that the greater amount of data being processed locally means that less is being transmitted to a central server, further cutting the risk.

There are several precautions that can be taken to ensure the integrity of Edge computing. These include ensuring that each connected device has built-in cyber security, making sure that all enclosures are physically secure and using remote security monitoring to log access attempts and intruders. Edge computing also allows far more scalability as the business grows and production plants expand. With smaller, more capable computing devices, installations can easily be expanded to account for greater volumes of data and applications.

There are several ways to ensure the process of adopting Edge computing goes smoothly.

The first is to choose an Edge computing vendor that works with a wide variety of both global and local partners. Such a vendor will work to globally recognized standards, ensuring that any products and solutions supplied will work together seamlessly.

Similarly, potential Edge users must look for solutions with standardized, pre-integrated and pre-validated architectures. This will ensure that the planning and deployment of the Edge project is both rapid and cost-effective.

When the time comes to deploying the Edge solution, an Edge configurator tool can be used. This can help firm up the design by incorporating such considerations as physical infrastructure, management, services, and security measures, allowing quick configuration and deployment.

By contrast, Cloud computing is where all data from the IIoT devices is gathered and processed in a centralized location. Any devices that need access to this data, or need to use any applications that use it, must first connect to the Cloud. The Cloud offers access to computer system resources on-demand, in particular data storage and computing power. Since everything is centralized, the Cloud is more straightforward to secure and control than Edge computing, while still allowing for reliable remote access.

More information on Cloud Computing will follow in part two of this series.

Narasimham Parimi, is the Digital Products Portfolio Manager Device Integration for ABB Process Control Products.

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Edge and the Cloud Partners or Competitors? Part I - Manufacturing.net