Tag Archive for: cloud computing

Is Aaron Levie Really Thinking Outside the Box?

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box-blog427Silicon Valley CEO Aaron Levie dropped out of college ten years ago to start his company, Box. Providing cloud computing services, Levie’s company is currently worth $2.1 billion and services over 40,000 paying customers which includes about half of the Fortune 500. However, it is not meeting growth projections and is counting on creating an ecosystem just as Apple and Microsoft have with their products. Levie argues it can be the center of a new industry “by helping other companies and third-party consultants create applications that can quickly draw off Box’s cloud-based collaboration technology.”

Despite these ambitions, Box has lost $167 million on revenue of $216 million which is still an improvement from the year before. This year, revenue is expected to grow by another 30 percent, “a marked slowdown that Mr. Levie hopes the new developer strategy may also turn around.” These losses scare not only Box, but also the generations of young tech ventures that never experienced the massive downturn that took place between 2000-2001.

Seasoned investors worry that newcomers may not take the risks as seriously. Ultimately, the losses faced by Box and newer tech companies as they rapidly grow are starting to catch up with them, and may be the beginning of a new downward trend in Silicon Valley.

Read the article here on The New York Times

What Cloud Computing Means to Your Job

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22bits-cloud-tmagArticle

With advancements in technology, there have been many accusations that technology has made many jobs that were once vital to running a society disappear. From the production line to the accounting office, more and more jobs are being replaced by computers and software and it’s only going to continue to grow. In this era of cloud computing that the tech industry is moving into, companies will require smaller departments and less workers. Many companies will eventually have to adapt to cloud computing and that can be an issue. Here are some of the main points from the biggest cloud companies around:

  • Ed Lazowska who holds a chair in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington said “Technology shapes styles of work. One critical advantage of the cloud is that sharing becomes dramatically easier.”
  •  David Campbell, who is the head of engineering at Microsoft Azure mentioned how they are able to make engineering changes by moving parts of its customers traffic into new software in real time which “takes hours, instead of months and years in the legacy”.
  • At Amazon Web Services they have built the worlds biggest cloud computing business. Work is divided into teams of small size in order to determine what the customer is doing with an important product. This allows the team to quickly adapt the product to work better and look for new insight. For 2014, Amazon announced that it’s cloud division created 60% more new products that it did in 2013.

One can conclude that companies who adapt to cloud computing will be more collaborative, more specialized, and ultimately be better at delivering their services and products. What do you think?

Read the entire article here