The Cloud – Simply a CapEx/OpEx Choice?

May 22, 2013 by Leave a comment

Ken Landoline

Ken Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • The cloud approach to telecom solutions is catching on like wildfire as a growing number of vendors offer a cloud version of their products and some report that cloud solutions already account for the major portion of all sales.
  • In addition to a shift of expenditures from a large capital outlay to a monthly operational expense the reasons companies are moving to the cloud fall into a few more categories including; flexibility in changing capacity levels, speed in adding applications to premise-based solutions while protecting current investments, and disaster recovery back-up.

While much is made of the CapEx versus OpEx comparison of premise- versus cloud-based solutions, it seems those decisions are limited, for the most part, to end users that are in the start-up or “greenfield” mode of their lifecycle. Conversations I have had with many enterprise end users regarding the premise versus cloud decision process, as well as vendors selling telecom solutions, suggest many purchasing situations fits into one of three scenarios. In scenario 1 the business has a premise-based solution but appreciates the ability of the cloud to add capacity when needed and shrink capacity when activity slows down. Such a situation could be a retail contact center with a premise-based solution that must expand and shrink based on the seasonality of their business. Adding remote, home-based agents via a cloud offering is the perfect solution. Scenario 2 are end users with a substantial investment in a premise-based solution but a requirement to add applications and broader functionality quickly and efficiently without scrapping the not yet depreciated investment. The application of a “hybrid” solution allows the business to add applications to existing solutions without scrapping the premise based solution prematurely, before it is fully depreciated. In scenario 3, a few end users see cloud solutions as a method of providing a disaster recovery, back-up system to their premise-based system that will take over operations when disaster strikes. In this situation the cloud solution can be run in parallel to the premise solution and the cloud could take over if and when the premise-based solution fails for any reason, maintaining operations. Although the disaster solution may add significantly to operating costs, in many situations company revenue streams can be preserved, which make it a feasible investment. Read more of this post

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‘BT for Life Sciences’ Maps Progress in Biomedical/Pharmaceutical IT Industry

May 9, 2013 by Leave a comment

Brian Washburn

Brian Washburn

Summary Bullets:

  • The ‘BT for Life Sciences’ program has built up personnel expertise and ramped up partners and customers, and it is adding adjacent services.
  • While the pharmaceutical sector enters integrators’ territory, major telecom service providers target opportunities across the wide spectrum of healthcare services.

Service providers know well by now that enterprise cloud services are about more than selling low-cost compute power.  The value of a cloud service is in the sum of applications, expertise and agility the provider brings to the table.  BT has been heavily focused on solution building – in the past, to the point of overextending itself with large, specialized consulting and professional services engagements.  Since then, the provider has taken a more pragmatic approach, which includes delivering industry-specific, repeatable cloud solutions.  BT’s vertical solutions targets include pharmaceutical industry contracts, and its BT for Life Sciences business unit puts it in good stead to compete for these compute-intensive projects. Read more of this post

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Commoditization and the Cloud: Bypassing the Race to the Bottom

May 2, 2013 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • Last month, Amazon Web Services cut EC2 prices for the 19th time since it launched its flagship service, reflecting the ongoing race to the price floor that so many IaaS providers are pursuing.
  • At what point do these reductions cut into service quality and features, or has that already happened?

In recent weeks, everyone from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to Rackspace has either slashed pricing for cloud offers or promised to beat their rivals’ prices.  There is no doubt that this competitive pursuit of business customers is sweetening the cloud’s appeal to the point where even the most reluctant of prospects have no choice but to consider their on-demand options.   However, all the battling to win the title of ‘Cloud Price Chopper King’ is also producing an unwanted result: the perception that the cloud is all about price.  This leads many businesses to wonder if there is any differentiation at all between and among mass-market public cloud solutions. Read more of this post

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Cloud-based MEAP is a Viable Alternative to Homegrown/Pure Play Software

April 15, 2013 by Leave a comment

Charlotte Dunlap

Charlotte Dunlap

Summary Bullets

  • Cloud-based services wiggle into the MEAP market segment
  • Salesforce.com will leverage and extend its successful cloud platform for mobile app development

The mobile app platform market just got a little more crowded and a little more interesting with a couple heavy hitters entering the space from a cloud services perspective. Salesforce.com and HP have just announced separate mobile cloud services, aimed at eliminating the cumbersome software development process involved with traditional software products. Read more of this post

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How Open Is OpenStack?

April 15, 2013 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • As the OpenStack Summit kicks off this week, the latest release, dubbed ‘Grizzly,’ is attracting notice for its impressive new feature list, which includes new support for VMware and Microsoft hypervisors as well as support for software-defined networking (SDN) implementations from Big Switch, Brocade and others.
  • However, if history teaches us anything, it is that individual vendor and provider implementations of the open source cloud platform may be sufficiently different from one another to eliminate the non-proprietary advantage that OpenStack claims.

In its relatively brief history, OpenStack has made remarkable gains.  Now in its seventh release, the open source cloud solution launched by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 boasts a veritable industry who’s who list of hundreds of developer contributors, including IT heavyweights such as Cisco, Dell, and Red Hat which have helped extend the cloud operating system’s feature set and capabilities to include support for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, compatibility with SDN implementations from a number of vendors, and more integrated security functionality.  The new features, along with a series of recent announcements of support for the open source infrastructure solution from providers such as IBM (and more organizations including Bloomberg and PayPal running OpenStack in production), highlight just how hot the cloud operating system is right now.  Read more of this post

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VMware’s Hybrid Cloud Challenge

March 25, 2013 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • VMware revealed what many suspected at a meeting of institutional investors: the company will enter the cloud fray with its own vCloud Hybrid Cloud Service later in 2013.
  • The offer promises what others have not quite been able to deliver yet: a seamless path between private on-premises clouds and hosted public offers.  However, big questions remain about what VMware will deliver – and how.

Depending upon your point of view, VMware’s official announcement of its intent to launch its own hybrid cloud offer could be either a game-changer for the cloud or a muddled effort from VMware to stay relevant in what continues to be a fast-changing segment.  VMware’s decision to introduce its own cloud service represents an unwelcome distraction from the company’s recent focus on a return to the fundamentals.  What is clear from the (limited) details VMware provided in the announcement and the immediate, almost always passionate reaction to the company’s plan to provide a hybrid offer is that no matter how many competing hypervisors and cloud platforms emerge, the vendor remains a significant force in virtualization and the cloud.  Read more of this post

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Healthcare Inches Into the Cloud

March 5, 2013 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • Recent research on cloud use conducted by IT provider CDW found that just 35% of the healthcare IT professionals surveyed are either implementing or supporting cloud deployments today.
  • Worries about security are keeping some health organizations on the sidelines; however, organizations in the industry are becoming increasingly receptive to the model, based at least in part on experience with on-demand storage and other services for personal use.

As adroit as the healthcare sector is when it comes to applying advanced medical technologies to improve diagnostics, treatments, and ultimately patient outcomes, the industry has a more awkward relationship with information technology in general and collaboration solutions in particular.  Though healthcare providers have often invested heavily in communications systems to streamline the information sharing process, many of these often proprietary implementations have fallen far short of expectations.  We can chalk some of the lackluster results to privacy and compliance issues that mandate organizations maintain tight control over information; however, there are also process and even cultural obstructions that are getting in the way of progress. Read more of this post

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Undervaluing Disaster Recovery in Data Center Services

February 19, 2013 by Leave a comment

Michal Halama

Michal Halama

Summary Bullets

  • Treating business continuity and disaster recovery services as ‘must-haves’ can obscure value and cost
  • Cloud-based business continuity and disaster recovery services can adjust to variable values over time

The best businesses (buyers and service providers) develop effective business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategies well in advance of natural and man-made catastrophes. AT&T’s investment and development of physical solutions to help customers recover from major outages is a good example. Some other organizations become focused later, and may survive (through good fortune). This can result in BCDR services later being assumed and treated as ‘must-haves’. They may then be bundled with underlying services, which can obscure the true value and cost of BCDR to service provider and customer alike. BCDR teams: does your organization value your service highly enough, or do colleagues see ‘must-have’ BCDR as a cost weighing on underlying service? Read more of this post

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Disruption (and Progress) in the Cloud, Continued

February 5, 2013 by Leave a comment

  • Amy Larsen DeCarlo

    Amy Larsen DeCarlo

    One of the bigger benefits promised by the cloud is cost-effective access to the latest and greatest technology, often including compute-intensive services that were out of reach for all but the largest enterprises.

  • Providers are now delivering some advanced services through the cloud including analytics and ERP applications.  The migration to the cloud, and away from a conventional consumption model, is having a profound impact on the hardware suppliers and the competitive playing field.  How will this shake up effect service delivery and customer choice?

In the traditional client/server computing model that dominated the market for so many years, organizations relied on a Cap-Ex-centered approach to IT consumption where their individual technology pursuits were tied directly to often tight hardware budgets and procurement cycles.  New application upgrades were linked to long term licensing agreements and sometimes lengthy hardware depreciation time tables. This could push some often ambitious processing-intensive projects well into the future or even outside the realm of possibility. Read more of this post

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Taking Cloud to Both Ends of the Spectrum

January 24, 2013 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • As enterprises embrace the cloud for broader use, providers are responding in kind with improved functionality and more services options aimed at customers at either end of the market spectrum (i.e., large enterprises and entry-level users).
  • Is there a risk these solutions will leave out the bulk of customers in the middle?

A new year means a new set of predictions for what is to come in the months ahead for IT.  Front and center in most prognostications are projections about 2013 being a big year for the cloud.  You won’t hear any arguments to the contrary here, as all signs point to broader market acceptance of and demand for cloud services.  At the same time, cloud providers are stepping up their portfolios with better features, simpler ordering and provisioning, and new pricing models that match the needs of a more diverse prospect pool.  Read more of this post

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