TECHNOLOGY UPDATE
www.comms-dealer.com Radicalism marches on THE CLOUD
Research firm Gartner has predicted that cloud computing will revolutionise the way that companies do business, and Outsourcery is at the vanguard of this radical transformation, claims Mark Seemann, the firm’s Chief Technology Officer.
A
ccording to Gartner, increased pressure on business owners to cut costs means that
cloud computing will become mainstream in around two-five years time, with the mass adoption of cloud computing by SMEs being driven by the flexibility that it offers. Gartner further claims that most SMEs will be inclined towards the hybrid ‘new wave’ which incorporates the benefits of on-premise solutions with the advantages of operating from the cloud. Outsourcery helped to pioneer the hybrid cloud communications model within the UK, launching its Unified Communications in the cloud with IP PBX overlay and winning the Microsoft Worldwide Hosting Partner of the Year as a result.
“There is great potential for the hybrid cloud, presenting an opportunity for PBX vendors to leverage cloud communications services to wrap around existing PBX deployments,” said Seemann. “The hybrid cloud also has great potential for scaling our customer infrastructure. For instance, a company with a custom on- premise business line application could use the cloud to essentially provide the public facing front end to the application, mitigating challenges such as scale, security and reliability. But will the majority of SMEs move to a hybrid cloud model? I am not so sure. There will be such a carte blanche move to this model. It largely depends on a number of factors including the type and size of the business and also the applications in question.”
For example, a small business using standard Microsoft applications is likely to move all their services to the cloud and have as little on-premise infrastructure as possible. Small businesses like to have maximum flexibility without on-premise infrastructure tying them into long-term contracts and making it harder to scale or move premises.
“Also, with virtualisation technology now mainstream, it is far easier for a customer to migrate their on-premise custom application to the cloud, without any changes required on the application itself,” commented Seemann. “That said it is clear that other factors such as broadband speed, quality and availability are huge factors when considering a cloud move. And customer trepidation will be a factor in the short-term, adding credence to the hybrid cloud model.”
There are a number of factors driving the growth for cloud solutions in the SMB space, such as increased employee productivity, lower operating costs and IT capex spend is high on the list of priorities. Another driving factor is enhanced flexibility. If the infrastructure is in the cloud then mobility for both employees and the business in general improves; and when the business is ready to scale either up or down the cloud model will easily support this change. SMEs are realising that cloud services can reduce business risk both in terms of offering them platform reliability and redundancy backed by a Service Level Agreement.
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86 COMMS DEALER NOVEMBER 2010 Mark Seemann
“There is great potential for the hybrid cloud”
“A cloud-based service provider that manages complex infrastructure and takes responsibility for engineering human resources and associated costs is attractive to a business whose core business is not managing IT Infrastructure,” added Seemann. “It is also worth noting that virtualisation is the most efficient delivery mechanism for cloud services, allowing effective contention of resources including CPU, memory, storage, power and even rack space, reducing these resource requirements by up to a factor of 15. This has a positive and material impact on the TCO of any cloud-based solution when compared with an on-premise or non-virtualised alternative. Modern cloud-based infrastructure allows for the virtualisation of not just information based services like Exchange and CRM, but also real time communications based services such as Unified Communications, hosted IP PBX and videoconferencing.”
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The cloud model has been around since 2000 in the guise of ASP (application service provision), but over the years the technology has matured and broadband has become more reliable and widespread. The wider press has been talking about the cloud for some time so more customers are now aware of cloud services and the advantages they can offer. Also, many employees and business owners now realise that they have actually been using one or more cloud services for many years. For instance, anyone who has ever used hotmail or Internet banking.
“It normally takes years for businesses to get comfortable with a new computing model or adopt new technology, however the recession has acted as a catalyst for change, driving customers towards adopting the cloud model sooner than was thought before the credit crunch,” noted Seemann. “The timing of the credit crunch was perfect for the cloud waiting to greet the cost conscious customer with open arms.”
There are a number of areas that cloud solutions can help resellers and their customers. Cloud as a delivery mechanism for software services drives down the cost of deploying and consuming technology. Resellers can help customers improve productivity and competitiveness by offering them the latest technology with less cost and more flexibility than their competitors offering on- premise deployments, believes Seemann. “Furthermore, The cloud allows deployments to scale down to a few seats giving smaller companies a chance to enjoy the capabilities that were once the domain of the large corporate,” he added. “Contrary to popular belief, these cloud services offer resellers excellent margins, either directly through the services themselves or by wrapping their own professional services around the deployments.”
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