FOCUS CLOUD LANDSCAPE
Issue 15, April/May
IN THIS CLOUD SECTION: Landscape
page 26 Futures
TOUCHING THE CLOUD
nformation technology is evolving away from a world that is server-centric to one that is service-centric. Companies are quickly moving away from monolithic systems that were wedded to one or more servers towards finer-grained, reusable services distributed inside and outside the enterprise.
I
That is the view of how IT will quickly evolve, according to consultancy Accenture. However, if you think this is something for the future then you are mistaken.
BIG OUTSOURCING DEALS
Cloud services are not just about companies buying short-term capacity for test and development applications. Already, large-scale outsourcing contracts are being signed, in which major companies are opting for utility- based provision of services upon which to run their own applications. This is the beginning of development of the application-driven enterprise.
John Breen, portfolio lead for cloud and utility services EMEA in the enterprise services division of HP, was part of the team behind a US$400m seven-year outsourcing deal with UK energy utility Centrica. Apart from a statement in the press release, Centrica is not yet talking about the deal. Breen said: “One of the things that continues to drive Infrastructure- as-a-Service (IaaS) is that most of the current applications being used are still architected, designed and lisensed on a per-server model.
Until they are architected for pooled or shared resources – especially for big companies with modularized applications such as SAP – they will run it on a platform that is IaaS based – ‘cloudize’ it and then move it.” Breen said he wasn’t involved in which applications were being run on behalf of Centrica from HP’s Wynyard data center in the north of England, but that HP will have offered application migration and management services.
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www.datacenterdynamics.com
Outsourcing Discussion Networks Services
Colocation By Ambrose McNevin
The market (suppliers) appears to be getting ready for a wholesale surge of applications shifting to the cloud. Despite the advertising, the
market (users) is assessing which
applications to test in the cloud. The shift is slow but inexorable.
SOFTWARE CATCH-UP
IDC says software vendors need to intensify their efforts to become cloud-ready, but it is a question of what is holding them back. Oracle was famously slow in adapting its licensing model for virtualization, but it is not alone in being slow to tackle cloud licensing issues.
David Bradshaw, research manager for European Software-as-a-Service (SaaS )and cloud services at IDC, says: “It takes time, money and determination [for vendors to move to the cloud], and you probably have to do it when you’re still fairly comfortable rather than waiting until you see shrinking market opportunity and your profits are nose- diving. I think some vendors are still a bit too comfortable, hoping it will all go away, doing what has
worked in the
past and
hoping it will get back to normal soon. But it won’t.”
“There is a mixed scene with applications
developers.
In areas such as CRM and talent management, the main services are very mature. In many others the maturity isn’t there,” adds Bradshaw.
Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction Company
Infrastructure Definitions
KEY CONCERNS
Beyond software, the list of enterprise concerns around cloud computing – data security, network security, physical security, access, service levels, contention for shared services, VM stability, data destruction, analytics, risk analysis, supplier management, supplier financial viabilty, fear of lock in, traceability – to name but a few, is not getting any shorter. But they are finally being acknowledged and addressed. n
“Research from HP indicates that senior business, government and technology executives believe that by 2015, 18% of their IT delivery will be through the public cloud and 28% by the private cloud. That leaves the remainder of IT delivery to be handled by traditional delivery methods, either managed in-house, outsourced or both. Are cloud services right for your business? The answer is usually, ‘it depends’.”
PATRICK HARR VP ENTERPRISE CLOUD SOLUTIONS HP
ATTITUDE TO THE CLOUD: We are definitely moving
towards putting things on the cloud, and as time goes on we will outsource more and more. The time will come when data centers such as ours will cease to exist. I expect this will take about four or five years.
CLOUD REALIZATIONS: We outsource some functions already and will eventually co-host our data center somewhere before putting everything
into the cloud. We will also move to put things on multiple clouds.
CLOUD CHALLENGES: We are grappling with the internal source of security and the need to develop a skillset for managing multiple vendors and multiple technologies at the moment. The skillsets in my organization predominantly lie in managing different vendors, and this will become even more important in the next three to five years. We will have different people managing vendors and others keeping track of technical advancements so that our technical architecture, while outsourced, has concepts that will lie with us.
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page 32,33 page 34 page 36
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