AWS grew at 46% clip in Q3

Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated $6.679 billion in revenue in Q3 2018, up 46% compared to a year ago. The business unit achieved operating income of $2.077 billion for the quarter, up 77% compared to year ago.

The annualized run rate is now above $26 billion.

Operating margin for AWS was 31%, while capital leases for data centers were up 9% yoy.

AWS Highlights for Q3

• AWS will open an infrastructure region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will consist of three Availability Zones. 
• Currently, AWS provides 55 Availability Zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another 12 Availability Zones across four AWS Regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the U.S. expected to come online in the coming months.
• New customer commitments and major migrations during the quarter: DoorDash is all-in on AWS; Hubspot and Samsung Heavy Industries selected AWS as their Preferred Public Cloud Provider; and Yelp moved its master database from its own data center to AWS, completing its migration to the AWS cloud.
• AWS announced a multi-year, global agreement to build a new multi-billion dollar DXC to deliver IT migration, application transformation, and business innovation to global Fortune 1000 clients. 
• AWS announced the general availability of new High Memory instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for large in-memory databases, including production deployments of SAP HANA.
• AWS announced the general availability of T3 instances, the next generation of burstable general-purpose instances for Amazon EC2.
• AWS announced general availability of a high frequency instance (z1d) for Amazon EC2, as well as the next generation of memory optimized instances (R5), and memory optimized instances with local storage (R5d). 
• AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless, a new deployment option for Amazon Aurora that automatically starts, scales, and shuts down database capacity with per-second billing for applications with less predictable usage patterns. 
• AWS announced Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on VMware. 

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Digital Realty reports continued growth data center leasing

Digital Realty reported revenues of $769 million for Q3 2018, a 2% increase from the previous quarter and a 26% increase from the same quarter last year. Net income was $90 million, and net income available to common stockholders of $67 million, or $0.33 per diluted share, compared to $0.32 per diluted share in the previous quarter and ($0.02) per diluted share in the same quarter last year.

“We continue to execute our core business strategy focused on high-value customer deployments, which favor direct interconnection to networks and cloud on-ramps. We are expanding our customer ecosystem and benefiting from strong organic growth,” said Paul Szurek, CoreSite’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our core retail colocation business continued its consistent leasing performance at good pricing, acquiring valuable new logos and expanding with key strategic customers and we made good progress on construction and development activities which will strengthen our scale leasing to edge deployments over the next eighteen months.”

"In the third quarter, we signed total bookings expected to generate $69 million of annualized GAAP rental revenue, including an $8 million contribution from interconnection," said Chief Executive Officer A. William Stein.  "This represents the second-highest bookings in the company's history, close on the heels of our record in the prior quarter.  We also announced our entry into the rapidly growing Brazilian market, and we took proactive steps to secure our supply chain and further strengthen our balance sheet.  We look forward to building on this momentum in the months ahead, setting the stage for sustainable growth into 2019 and beyond."

Key metrics:

• Digital Realty has 198 data centers worldwide
• Digital Realty closed on the sale of 360 Spear Street, a 155,000 square foot data center in San Francisco, for $92 million.  The facility was 39% leased and was expected to generate cash net operating income of approximately $2 million in 2018, representing a nominal exit cap rate of 1.9%.  The sale generated net proceeds of $91 million, and Digital Realty recognized a gain on the sale of approximately $27 million in the third quarter of 2018.
• Digital Realty acquired three separate sites in Manassas, Virginia, Sterling, Virginia and Sydney, Australia, totaling 51.5 acres for a combined investment of $40 million, or approximately $773,000 per acre.  The three sites are expected to support the development of approximately 138 megawatts of critical power.  Digital Realty also entered into an agreement to acquire 424 acres of undeveloped land in Loudoun County, Virginia for a purchase price of $236.5 million, or approximately $558,000 per acre.  
• Digital Realty entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ascenty, the leading data center provider in Brazil, from private equity firm Great Hill Partners in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion. 
• Digital Realty had approximately $9.2 billion of total debt outstanding as of September 30, 2018, comprised of $9.1 billion of unsecured debt and approximately $0.1 billion of secured debt. 

http://investor.digitalrealty.com/investor-relations/general-investor-overview/investor-relations-overview/default.aspx

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CoreSite says monthly recurring revenue per data center cabinet increased 7.0% yoy

CoreSite Realty reported total operating revenues of $139.2 million for Q3 2018, a 13.1% increase year over year. Third-quarter net income per diluted share was $0.52, a 13.0% increase year over year.

“We continue to execute our core business strategy focused on high-value customer deployments, which favor direct interconnection to networks and cloud on-ramps. We are expanding our customer ecosystem and benefiting from strong organic growth,” said Paul Szurek, CoreSite’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our core retail colocation business continued its consistent leasing performance at good pricing, acquiring valuable new logos and expanding with key strategic customers and we made good progress on construction and development activities which will strengthen our scale leasing to edge deployments over the next eighteen months.”

Q3 Highlights for CoreSite's data center business

• Data center lease commencements totaled 36,576 NRSF at a weighted average GAAP rental rate of $160 per NRSF, which represents $5.9 million of annualized GAAP rent.
• Renewed leases with annualized GAAP rent of $16.2 million, with rent growth of 3.2% on a cash basis and 5.8% on a GAAP basis, and recorded rental churn of 2.5% in the third quarter
• Executed 120 new and expansion data center leases for 31,330 NRSF, representing $6.1 million of net annualized GAAP rent at an average rate of $193 per square foot
• CoreSite’s renewal leases signed in the third quarter totaled $16.2 million in annualized GAAP rent, comprised of 97,682 NRSF at a weighted-average GAAP rental rate of $166 per NRSF, a 3.2% increase in rent on a cash basis and a 5.8% increase on a GAAP basis. The third-quarter rental churn rate was 2.5%.
• As a result of renewals and growth in interconnection and power revenues, monthly recurring revenue per cabinet equivalent increased 7.0% over the prior-year period.
• As of September 30, 2018, CoreSite had a total of 160,591 square feet of turn-key data center capacity under construction and had spent $100.7 million of the estimated $281.8 million required to complete the projects.

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Nokia announces cost cutting, job losses and corporate realignment

Nokia announced a corporate realignment and cost cutting program aimed at refocusing its efforts on high-performance, end-to-end networks, expansion into new enterprise segments, building a standalone software business, and generating significant licensing revenues.

Specifically, Nokia aims to reduce of its annualized operating expenses and production overheads by EUR 700m by the end of 2020 compared to the end of 2018, of which EUR 500m is expected from operating expenses.

Cost savings will come from automation; process and tool simplification; significant reductions in central support functions; prioritization of R&D programs; a sharp reduction of R&D in legacy products; efficiency from further application of a common software foundation and innovative software development techniques; the consolidation of selected cross-company activities; and further reductions in real estate and other overhead costs.

Nokia said the cost cutting will entail a net reduction of employees globally but did not disclose the size of the expected cuts.

"Nokia has made considerable progress in executing on its strategy, with excellent momentum in providing high-performance end-to-end networks, targeting new enterprise segments and creating a standalone software business," said Rajeev Suri, President and CEO. "Our early progress in 5G is extremely strong, we continue to increase our investment in this critical technology, and our win rate for new deals suggests that we are in a very good competitive position."

"With the successful Alcatel-Lucent integration and cost-saving program soon to be behind us, we are taking steps to accelerate the execution of our strategy and sharpen our customer focus. We will also redouble our efforts to ensure that Nokia's disciplined operating model remains a source of competitive advantage for us, and that we maintain our position as the industry leader in cost management, productivity and efficiency. We noted earlier this year that we would need to take further cost actions in order to deliver on our 2020 guidance. Today, we are quantifying those actions and raising the certainty that we can meet those commitments," Suri said.

Highlights of the plan include:

• Creating a new Enterprise Business Group that consolidates a range of existing, fast-growing activities into one focused organization reporting directly to the President and CEO.  
• Accelerating Nokia's strong momentum in 5G by sharpening the focus of the Mobile Networks Business Group to be on mobile radio products.
• Strengthening Nokia's capability to deliver industry-leading, fully-integrated and tested Cloud Core solutions by aligning both resources and accountability to the Nokia Software Business Group.
• Kathrin Buvac, who is currently Chief Strategy Officer for Nokia, has been nominated as President of Enterprise. 

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Intel's data-centric revenue grew 22 percent

Intel reported record third-quarter revenue of $19.2 billion, up 19 percent YoY.

“Stronger than expected customer demand across our PC and data-centric businesses continued in the third quarter. This drove record revenue and another raise to our full-year outlook, which is now up more than six billion dollars from our January expectations. We are thrilled that in a highly competitive market, customers continue to choose Intel,” said Bob Swan, Intel CFO and Interim CEO. “In the fourth quarter, we remain focused on the challenge of supplying the incredible market demand for Intel products to support our customers' growth. We expect 2018 will be another record year for Intel, and our transformation positions us to win share in an expanded $300 billion1 total addressable market.”

Highlights:

• The PC-centric business (CCG) delivered record revenue, up 16 percent. 
• The data-centric businesses grew 22 percent YoY led by 26 percent growth in the Data Center Group (DCG). DCG achieved record quarterly revenue driven by strong demand from cloud and communications service providers investing to meet the explosive demand for data and to improve the performance of data-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence. In Q3, DCG shipped the first Intel Optane™ DC Persistent Memory for revenue, and Intel® Xeon® Scalable set 95 new performance world records2 as adoption continued.
• The Internet of Things Group (IOTG) also achieved record revenue. Excluding Wind River, which Intel divested in the second quarter, IOTG revenue was up 19 percent YoY on broad business strength. Record revenue in Intel's memory business (NSG) was up 21 percent YoY.
• Intel's Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) revenue grew 6 percent YoY with continued strength in the data center and strong organic growth. PSG expanded its product line with the acquisition of eASIC and the introduction of the new Intel® Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with Intel® Stratix 10 SX FPGA.
• Mobileye also achieved record quarterly revenue of $191 million, up approximately 50 percent YoY3 as customer momentum continued. Mobileye won 8 new design at major US and global automakers in Q3, bringing its year-to-date design win total to 20.

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Nokia posts net sales of EUR 5.5 billion, up 1%

Nokia reported net sales of EUR 5.5 billion for Q3 2018, compared to EUR 5.5 billion in Q3 2017. On a constant currency basis, reported net sales grew by 1% year on year. Nokia achieved year-on-year growth across all five of its Networks business groups, as well as in Nokia Technologies.

Reported diluted EPS in Q3 2018 was negative EUR 0.02, compared to negative EUR 0.03 in Q3 2017, primarily driven by lower restructuring and impairment charges, partially offset by the absence of non-recurring catch-up licensing net sales, which benefitted the year-ago period, our gross profit performance and income taxes.

"Nokia's third-quarter results validate our earlier view that conditions would improve in the second half of 2018. This was particularly evident in our excellent momentum in orders, growth across all five of our Networks business groups, and improved profitability compared to the first half of the year. Despite some risks related to short-term delays in project timing and product deliveries, we remain on track to deliver on our full-year guidance," stated Rajeev Suri, Nokia's President and CEO.

Regarding its Networks business, Nokia said its order backlog was strong at the end of Q3 2018, and that it continues to expect commercial 5G network deployments to begin near the end of 2018.

Nokia Technologies posted a 19% year-on-year growth in recurring licensing net sales. A decrease in net sales on a year-on-year basis was primarily due to the absence of approximately EUR 180 million of non-recurring catch-up licensing net sales, which benefitted the year-ago period.

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Nokia and Samsung extend patent license agreement

Nokia and Samsung extended their patent license agreement, which would otherwise have expired at the end of 2018.

Under the agreement, Samsung will make payments to Nokia for a multi-year period beginning 1 January 2019 onwards. The terms of the agreement remain confidential between the parties.

"Samsung is a leader in the smartphone industry and has been a Nokia licensee for many years," said Maria Varsellona, Nokia Chief Legal Officer and President of Nokia Technologies. "We are pleased to have reached agreement to extend our license. This agreement demonstrates the strength of our patent portfolio and our leadership in R&D and licensing for cellular standards including 5G."

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ZTE jumps right back to profitability

Jumping right back after nearly getting shut down as a result of the U.S. export ban, ZTE Corporation reported net profit of RMB 564 million for the third quarter.

ZTE reported operating revenue of RMB 19.3 billion, and its R&D investment reached RMB 3.47 billion, covering 17.9% of the quarter’s revenue, a year-on-year increase of 6.7%, compared with 11.2% of the same period last year.

Operating revenue of the first nine months ended 30 September 2018 reached  RMB 58.8 billion, and net profit attributable to holders of ordinary shares of the listed company amounted to RMB -7.26 billion.

The company said it strengthened its cost control, and reduced its sales and management expenses on a year-on-year basis.

ZTE also published its Preliminary Announcement of 2018 Annual Results, estimating that net profit attributable to holders of ordinary shares of the listed company for the year of 2018 amounted from RMB -7.2 billion to RMB -6.2 billion.

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ADVA reports fourth quarter in a row with sequential growth

ADVA Optical Networking reported Q3 2018 revenue of EUR 126.2 million, up 2% from EUR 123.8 million in Q2 2018 and increased by 13.5% from EUR 111.2 million in the same year-ago period. Revenues for Q3 2018 were within the guidance forecast the company provided on July 19, 2018 of between EUR 123 million and EUR 133 million.

Net income for Q3 2018 was EUR 3.9 million, down from EUR 4.6 million in Q2 2018 and significantly improved in comparison to the same year-ago period net loss of EUR 14.0 million.

“Q3 2018 was the company’s fourth quarter in a row with sequential growth,” said Uli Dopfer, CFO, ADVA. “In addition to our top line momentum, our solid profitability confirms that we are on the right track to further scale our business. Our forecast for the current fourth quarter points to further sequential growth as well as a year-over-year increase compared to Q4 2017. The positive order intake and the overall healthy demand from numerous important customers provide a solid backdrop for us for the remaining fiscal year and beyond.”

https://www.advaoptical.com/en/about-us/investors/investor-presentations

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USEI picks Ciena for 100G national backbone

US Electrodynamics (USEI), a satellite and telecommunications company headquartered that operates teleports in both Brewster, Washington and Vernon Valley, New Jersey, selected Ciena’s packet networking portfolio to upgrade its network to a 100G backbone.

USEI, which supports a variety of customers across the broadcast, aviation, maritime and government sectors, will uprade its current national 10G network by building its own dedicated terrestrial network, bringing capacity closer to the network edge and enabling its customers to scale bandwidth in near real-time providing enhanced service levels.

The project will use Ciena’s 5170 Service Aggregation Switch.

“This USEI network upgrade to support 100G is central to our ability in staying ahead of today’s customer requirements while in parallel, building a network that supports the latest advantages of data science and data transport utilizing machine learning and deep learning to enable a better future of the highest speed networks, from very small to very big,” stated Jim Veeder, Chief Executive Officer and USEI Owner.

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Mellanox hits record revenue of $279.2 million, up 24%

Mellanox Technologies reported record revenue of $279.2 million for Q3 2018, an increase of 23.7 percent, compared to $225.7 million in the third quarter of 2017. GAAP gross margins of 65.8 percent in the third quarter, compared to 65.7 percent in the third quarter of 2017. GAAP net income was $37.1 million in the third quarter, compared to $3.4 million in the third quarter of 2017.  Non-GAAP net income was $71.4 million in the third quarter, compared to $36.6 million in the third quarter of 2017.

“Mellanox continues to execute and gain momentum in the markets we participate in. We reported another record quarter in Q3, delivering 24% revenue growth and 90% non-GAAP operating income growth year-over-year. This resulted in a non-GAAP operating margin of 26.2%," said Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. "Our strong results reflect the differentiated and superior product technologies that Mellanox has to offer for data center infrastructure.”

“The innovations built into our high-speed Ethernet adapters, switches and cables are fueling demand for our Ethernet products. Leading hyperscale, cloud, enterprise data center and artificial intelligence customers continue to choose Mellanox to maximize the efficiency and utilization of their compute and storage investments. This has resulted in further market share gains across our high-speed Ethernet products and 59% year-over-year revenue growth in our Ethernet business."

Mellanox also announed that it has shipped more than 2.1 million Ethernet adapters during the first nine months of 2018.

The company said this milestone signals that high-performance Ethernet technology (25G and faster) has moved beyond the Super 7 cloud and web titans. The adoption of high-performance Ethernet technology has spread to enterprise data centers globally, including the next wave of cloud, telco/service providers, financial services and more.

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Arctic Wolf raises $45 million for Cyber Security Ops Center service

Arctic Wolf Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California with offices in Ontario, Canada, raised $45 million in series C funding for its security operations center (SOC)-as-a-service.

Arctic Wolf will use the new funding to accelerate company growth and meet the soaring demand for its SOC-as-a-service offering.

The Arctic Wolf service provides a cloud-based security incident and event management (SIEM) application combined with a team of expert security engineers committed to the client's operational requirements.

The new funding was led by Future Fund with participation from new investors Adams Street and Unusual Ventures, as well as existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sonae Investment Management and Knollwood Investment Advisory LLC. To date, Arctic Wolf has raised $91.2 million.

“Our growing team of security engineers is redefining the economics of security to protect companies of all sizes,” said Brian NeSmith, CEO and co-founder of Arctic Wolf. “In addition to supporting continued company growth, the funding will accelerate expansion of our service offering, as we continue to scale and expand to meet our customers’ individualized needs. We look forward to continuing our momentum and building out our internal vulnerability assessment and endpoint detection and response capabilities, in particular.”

• Arctic Wolf is headed by Brian NeSmith, who previously was CEO of Blue Coat Systems. Before that, he was the CEO of Ipsilon Networks (acquired by Nokia). 

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Presidential memo calls for National Spectrum Strategy

President Trump issued a memorandum directed the Department of Commerce and federal agencies to develop a National Spectrum Strategy. The goal is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for policy makers on all levels.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-leading-way-wireless-technology-empowering-american-innovation-2/

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BT appoints Philip Jansen as CEO

BT Group appointed Philip Jansen as its new Chief Executive and as Executive Director on its Board.

He will join the company on 1 January 2019 and following a handover period will take over from Gavin Patterson as Chief Executive on 1 February 2019.

Philip Jansen, 51, has served as CEO of Worldpay since 2013, leading the business through the UK’s largest ever financial technology IPO. From 2010 to 2013, Philip served as CEO of Brakes Group, which supplies food, drink and other products to the catering industry in Europe. He remained on the Board of Brakes, as Chairman, until 2015. Prior to this, Philip spent six years with Sodexo, joining in 2004 to run the UK & Ireland business.

Philip joins from Worldpay, the global payments services group, where he will be stepping down as Co-Chief Executive at the end of the year. Philip has been Chief Executive of Worldpay since 2013, leading it through its flotation in 2015, until its combination with Vantiv in 2018 to create a global leader in eCommerce. He has previously been CEO and then Chairman of Brakes Group and has held a variety of senior roles in Sodexo Group, latterly as Chief Operating Officer and CEO, Europe, South Africa and India. Earlier in his career Philip was COO of MyTravel PLC and Managing Director of Telewest Communications PLC’s Consumer Division. He started his career with Procter and Gamble.

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