MANAGED SERVICES cloud
How important is it that end users have true visibility of the Cloud/ Services provider’s offering? ie do they need to know how many other vendors/colos might be behind any particular service?
This should not be a concern for the end-user. The company or IT Department however should be concerned. They must asses the trust they have in their cloud / managed services provider, in terms of continuity, stability, scalability, security and support.
Unlike other Web Services players, with IBM Softlayer we offer the client complete visibility into the hardware infrastructure behind the cloud. It is nonsense to say that you don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure. With SoftLayer, you can drill down to the server, the rack, the network board, the serial numbers ... everything down to the encryption level on the drive even in multi-tenanted systems.
That may not seem very cloudy to some, but offering such transparency -- and in single-tenanted systems, granular control over configuration -- delivers special benefit to our customers. For example if we had a customer who was writing a big data solution for retail - they were using SSD drives, and their developers were demanding better performance from the drives. These developers looked into the drives, and found that their drives actually had two versions of firmware. They swapped the firmware on the drives -- simply pushing a button and making an API call -- and performance went up 25 percent. In opaque environments that lack this granularity, you’ve got to buy 25 percent more machine.
This extreme level of visibility comes from SoftLayer’s Infrastructure Management System (IMS), an API layer that today offers 2,200 documented methods across 180 discrete services.
How do you see the Cloud/Managed Services market developing over time? Will we reach that true utility model, with a handful of major providers, or will there always be room for smaller operators?
100% true utility is not likely to happen in my lifetime! There will always be companies, processes or applications that run on premises or outside a cloud. This does not mean that there will not be a level of consolidation in the future as the market fir cloud suppliers starts to rationalize around a handful of major providers each with an ecosystem of partners. However we are still far from that and even when it does occur, there will always be a place for local specialist solution provider partners around those major vendors fulfilling specific client needs. That is why an open standards approach is crucial, allowing a collaborative approach to providing the best possible client solution.
Please can you provide details of IBM’s Cloud/Managed Services strategy to date?
With a broad cloud computing portfolio and deep cloud expertise, IBM can help clients confidently realize the benefits of cloud.,We offer a comprehensive set of capabilities, providing the foundations of building and deploying both private or hybrid clouds, delivering platform and infrastructure capabilities as a service, and supplying our suite of software capabilities available on the cloud; ranging from collaboration to business process management and web analytics.
Recently we acquired Softlayer to extend our SmartCloud services portfolio, offering now self-service cloud infrastructure with instant deployment and over 100 Software as a Service solutions
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IBM’s cloud solutions are engineered to Open Standards, allowing a more collaborative approach to providing solutions.
And last but not least importantly we integrate our ecosystem partners, incorporating technologies to bring the benefits of cloud to clients.
This approach to offer clients truly the best possible cloud deployment format, breakthrough new business technologies AND the seamless integration with existing applications and infrastructures is the reason why: £ 80% of Fortune 500 companies use IBM cloud capabilities £ 30% of the 100 most visited websites have chosen for our cloud infrastructure
£ IBM now powers almost 270.000 more sites than Amazon!
What’s happening in this space at IBM right now? (I believe the labs are developing plenty of clever ideas!)
We are shifting more and more weight behind our cloud strategy. This is already resulting in major market penetration. With $1 billion in revenue in the past quarter alone we are by far the leader in cloud computing revenue. But we are not done yet.
We have deployed 400 employees to OpenStack, an open source software project with more than 200 corporate members that goes after much of the proprietary cloud systems of Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
We also keep investing in the development of our delivery capabilities and offerings, offering businesses possibilities of which we currently can only dream about.
How do you see IBM’s offering developing into the future – what would you like to see the company doing over and above its current portfolio?
You can expect a series of announcements from IBM in 2014 that will challenge the competition and shake up the market. More than 100 products, like e-commerce and marketing tools, will be launch on the Cloud as a comprehensive series of offerings for business, as will another 40 infrastructure services, like big data analysis and mobile applications development. This comes on top of over 100 SaaS offerings that IBM already has.
Can you give one or two brief examples of how IBM is helping end users leverage the benefits of the Cloud/Managed Services?
In addition to the examples mentioned earlier, Monitize and Bison, others like
Tiket.com are among the thousands of clients that are realizing the benefits of the Cloud with IBM and its partners.
After moving to the IBM Cloud
Tiket.com achieved their objective of improving their response to massive spikes in their business – on one occasion they sold 5,000 Big Bang concert tickets in 15 minutes with 15,000 concurrent users. Their main competitor crashed for four hours under a similar workload.
Any other comments... Follow me on twitter : @simonlporter
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uk.linkedin.com/in/simonlporter On visit our cloudpage:
ibm.com/cloud
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