Technology

With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion.

Letstart with market leader, Amazon Web Services. Canalys has them with 31 percent of the market while Synergy Research puts them at 34 percent. Thatclose enough to be considered a dead heat. As SynergyJohn Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years.

Those competitors, by the way, are no slouches by any means. They include Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba, so some pretty elite enterprise players. As we&ve noted in past analyses, one of the primary issues for all the competitors is how late they were to the market. They gave Amazon a massive head start, and they show no signs of ceding that lead any time soon.

Of course, AWS isn&t standing still either, it grew 48 percent last quarter by Canalys& estimate, while Synergy has AWS marketshare up a tick to 34 percent.

Interestingly, Synergy finds this overall competitor growth did not cut into Amazonmarketshare at all, but was the result of continued growth in the marketplace, as companies continue to shift workloads to the cloud. &The rapid growth of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba sees them all increase their market shares too, but it is not at the expense of AWS,& SynergyJohn Dinsdale pointed out in a statement.

Microsoft and Google still growing fast

That is not to say that Microsoft and Google are not growing too. In fact, Canalys had Microsoft growing at an 89 percent clip last quarter while Google grew an amazing 108 percent. Italways important to point out that iteasier to grow from a small number to a bigger number than it is to grow from a big number to a bigger number. Yet AWS continues to defy that idea and grow anyway, although not quite at the rate of its competitors.

Synergy reports these marketshare percentages for the competitors: Microsoft 14 percent, IBM 8 percent, Google 6 percent and Alibaba 4 percent, while Canalys shows Microsoft with 18 percent and Google with 8 percent. It did not report on IBM or Alibaba.

While these growth numbers have to drop at some point, they could continue to grow for the next several years as large companies get more comfortable with the cloud and move increasing percentages of their workloads.

Of course, even then itnot a zero sum game. As we see increasing use of data-intensive workloads involving internet of things, blockchain and artificial intelligence, itentirely possible that the market will continue to grow even with fewer workloads moving from private data centers.

For now, even with their eye-popping growth numbers, the competition continues to chase AWS. Even as these companies find ways to differentiate themselves with different approaches, offerings and services, the market dynamics are hardening and catching AWS seems less and less likely.

It also seems increasingly less likely that some small upstart can come in and undermine the top players, as it just takes too much investment to keep up with them and their scale. &In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, [the market leaders] are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data center infrastructure and operations. Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,& SynergyDinsdale said a statement.

What the competitors need to do now is continue to focus on customer requirements and what they can offer in terms of price and service to continue to take advantage of their own unique strengths. Thereplenty of room in this space for everyone to thrive, but some will thrive more than others. Thatjust the nature of the market.

Even as the Argentine government was announcing the biggest slide in the countryeconomic output in nearly a decade, technology investors in the nationcapital are all gearing up for record fundraising years.

Three of the countrybiggest firms (which are still small by international standards) are raising new, exponentially larger, funds in a sign that technology companies are showing promise despite the bleak picture painted by the broader economy in Latin America.

Leading the pack is NXTP Labs, the early stage investor thatdeveloping a regional network of accelerators and seed investment funds through partnerships that extend from Mexico City to Montevideo and Sao Paulo up to San Francisco. Despite its regional reach, home for NXTP is Buenos Aires and itthere that the firm began accelerating and investing in early stage companies back in 2011.

NXTP has already had 13 exits, according to Crunchbase, and is perhaps the most mature of the crop of investment firms in the country. Italso looking to be among the largest as it capitalizes on that trackrecord of exists and a portfolio of investments that has raised follow-on capital of nearly half a billion dollars.

The firm is currently knocking on doors to raise $120 million, a significant step up from its previous $38.5 million investment vehicle.

NXTP Labs isn&t the only firm based in Argentina thatlooking to significantly expand its capital under management. Jaguar Ventures,a firm that invests in both Argentina and Mexico, andDraper Cygnus, an Argentine-focused, Buenos Aires-based investment firm has already raised roughly $30 million of the $60 million it has targeted for its new fund,

While Cygnus is very much focused on the early-stage Argentine opportunity (which makes sense given the track record of technology companies coming out of the country — and the capital behind the firm) both NXTP and Jaguar have more of a regional perspective. And Jaguar, too, is massively increasing the size of its fund.

While its first fund was only $10 million, the new one will be closer to $60 million, according to one person with knowledge of the firmplans.

Behind the surge of confidence in the regiontechnology fortunes, despite the economic turmoil that continues to roil the region, is a growing track record of valuable companies — all with a homebase in Latin Americalargest market.

And while Brazil remains the regionundisputed economic powerhouse, there&re growing numbers of tech giants coming from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, investors said.

As Gonzalo Costa, a co-founder of NXTP Labs wrote in an editorial for TechCrunch earlier this week:

For the first time, companies are raising rounds of $100 million plus. 99 (acquired by Didi Chuxing), Nubank and Rappi, have all raised mega rounds in the past two years. Others have raised large rounds, such as Selina and Movile, with $90 million-plus, or Auth0 (part of our portfolio), with $50 million rounds in 2018.But the increase in dollar amounts is not only driven by mega rounds. More than 30 transactions of $3 million or more happened in 2017, which is triple in amount of rounds of that figure when compared to 2016. This shows a market maturity not seen before.

Not only are companies attracting more capital, but entrepreneurs are launching companies across a dizzying array of technology verticals.

These are companies like NubiMetrics, which provides competitive analysis and data for marketplaces like MercadoLibre; or Satellogic, which is developing a network of satellites for earth observation (and raised $27 million last year); or Pago Rural, which provides financing options for farmers in Latin America (and is raising a $20 million round, according to sources).

Itclear that venture capital and tech in Argentina (and across Latin America) is having a moment. But with a broader base of local capital, itpossible that this moment could become a movement. And that would have a profound effect on economies around the world.

Opera is now a public company. The Norway-based company priced its initial public offering at $12 a share — the company initially expected to price its share in the $10 to $12 price range. Trading opened at $14.34 per share, up 19.5 percent. The company raised over $115 million with this IPO.

Opera Ltd. filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. earlier this month. The company is now trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol OPRA.

Chances are you are reading this article in Google Chrome on your computer or Android phone, or in Safari if you&re reading from an iPhone. Opera has a tiny market share compared to its competitors. But itsuch a huge market that itenough to generate revenue.

In its F-1 document, the company revealed that it generated $128.9 million in operating revenue in 2017, which resulted in $6.1 million in net profit.

The history of the company behind Opera is a bit complicated. A few years ago, Opera shareholders decided to sell the browser operations to a consortium of Chinese companies. The adtech operations now form a separate company called Otello.

Opera Ltd., the company that just went public, has a handful of products —a desktop browser, different mobile browsers and a standalone Opera News app. Overall, around 182 million people use at least one Opera product every month.

The main challenge for Opera is that most of its revenue comes from two deals with search engines — Google and Yandex. Those two companies pay a fee to be the default search engine in Opera products. Yandex is the default option in Russia, while Google is enabled by default for the rest of the world.

The company also makes money from ads and licensing deals. When you first install Opera, the browser is pre-populated with websites by default, such as eBay and Booking.com. Those companies pay Opera to be there.

Now, Opera will need to attract as many users as possible and remain relevant against tech giants. Operabusiness model is directly correlated to its user base. If there are more people using Opera, the company will get more money from Google, Yandex and its advertising partners.