Tag: public cloud

Why Is Cloud Migration Reversing from Public to on-Premises Private Clouds? | Blog

Increasingly this year, we see many companies that aggressively migrated their work from on-premises clouds looking to move work back to on-premises and private clouds. The mindset that the public cloud saves money because a company only pays for what it uses is just theoretical and really an illusion. Realistically, companies tend to buy capacity rather than actual time used. Thus, companies are in a take-or-pay situation like the economics of a private cloud or on-premises solution.

Read more in my blog on Forbes

CSS Corp Cloud Services Making an Impact | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

For several years we’ve predicted that the cloud would disrupt data centers. But it’s not as simple as lift and shift; it requires an understanding of how to deploy in the cloud and also requires some reengineering. Now some innovators are succeeding in deployment solutions and achieving momentum. One that caught our eye: the explosive growth of CSS Corp Cloud Services.

CSS is off and running. Need evidence? Among other clients, they’re currently working with:

  • 12 Fortune 100 companies
  • 12% of the top 50 U.S. companies
  • 16% of the world’s 25 largest banks
  • 5 of the world’s largest Fortune 350 manufacturing companies

The issue around using any public cloud — especially the lowest-cost cloud, AWS — is that it requires re-architecting applications in such a way to get enterprise performance. This has been a significant constraint in the migration of workloads to public clouds.

But we’re now seeing real use cases emerging where companies systematically take production workloads, reengineer them and deploy them into the public cloud in a way that gives them production-quality outcomes — that is, high performance and high resilience.

CSS Corp Cloud Services was an early AWS adopter. The firm invested in toolsets around AWS cloud services and developed a capability for consistently re-architecting and deploying into the AWS public cloud. The company’s public-cloud use cases already span a wide area of processes including Big Data analytics, digital marketing, e-commerce, backup and storage, disaster recovery, application and Web hosting, development and test environments and media/entertainment.

Data centers are not yet an endangered species. But as firms such as CSS master cloud deployment in large corporate enterprises, we believe the rate of disruption will quickly pick up.

Empire Building: The Impact of IBM’s Acquisition of SoftLayer Technologies | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

The cloud services space just got a lot more interesting. Announced earlier this month, IBM paid a hefty price — $2 billion — to buy Dallas, Texas-based SoftLayer Technologies, the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider.

IBM is now well on the way to delivering on the goal stated in its 2012 annual report: to make a key impact on cloud and reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015. Clearly IBM wants to participate in the revenue potential from the growth of cloud services. Big Blue has already spent $4.5 billion over the past five years to build its SmartCloud portfolio of cloud services, but those acquisitions were in the private cloud arena. To compete broadly in this lucrative market, IBM needed a compelling offering in the public cloud arena.

A recent report from North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research predicts the cloud market will reach $158.8 billion by 2014. And Gartner predicts the market will grow to $210 billion by 2016.

The SoftLayer acquisition accelerates IBM’s efforts to establish a footprint in the public cloud arena without having to start from scratch when AWS, Google, Rackspace and others already dominate the space. SoftLayer’s cloud infrastructure platform, and its existing 21,000 customers, gives IBM immediate scale and relevance.

Other than increased revenue, why does IBM want to have a compelling offering in the public cloud space in the first place?

They believe — correctly, I think — that significant workloads will migrate from the data center and private clouds to the public cloud. There is a set of workloads that, quite frankly, are more attractive in the public cloud than they are in a private cloud space (web hosting, application development and testing, and email, for example). It makes more sense to pay for these services on an hourly basis rather than on a monthly or yearly basis.

We believe these types of services currently comprise about 50 percent of the workloads that currently run in IBM customers’ data centers or their private cloud environments. So about half of IBM’s customer workflows are well positioned to move into the public cloud. They won’t all move at once, but we see clear indications that they are starting to move. If IBM is to provide comprehensive cloud services, it needs a smooth path for migrating those workloads. SoftLayer gives IBM the capability to create a glide path.

Thus, IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is both a defensive strategy and an offensive strategy. On the offense, they want to increase market share in the fast-growing public cloud space and need a compelling offering to compete with AWS, Google, Rackspace and other cloud players. On the defense, they need to create a migration path from traditional IT infrastructure space into the public cloud.

I don’t think the SoftLayer acquisition is a game-changer. Nor do I think it remakes the cloud space. But it does put IBM into a credible role.

Will this acquisition be enough to secure IBM’s position as a cloud leader? I suspect it isn’t enough, given the role that IBM likely will want to play. I think we will see further acquisitions to build up IBM’s capabilities and scale.


Photo credit: Simon Greig (xrrr)

Video: Cloud Connect Silicon Valley 2013: Private, Public, Hybrid Clouds – Neal Sample | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Neal Sample, CIO, Enterprise Growth, for American Express. Prior to American Express, Neal served as the CTO of X.commerce, eBay’s open development and commerce platform, and he also served as Vice President of Architecture and Platform Products at eBay. Prior to eBay, Neal was a senior executive at Yahoo! where he led the Open, Social, and Participation platforms. In this video, Neal chats with Scott Bils, Everest Group’s Next Generation IT Practice Leader, about his experience implementing private, public, and hybrid clouds at three very different companies.

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