Tag: enterprise

Cloud Wars: the Demise of Simplicity and Standardization | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

In its comparatively short yet highly significant lifetime, the cloud industry has quickly devolved into a confusing morass of technology jingoism, marketing hype, aggression, and even negative allegations. Though the SaaS world is reasonably understood, it’s the infrastructure cloud that is creating an enterprise cloud war. Just think about the flurry of announcements and assertions about the big boys of technology taking sides with various cloud platforms or hypervisors:

  • Rackspace announced that OpenStack will be its cloud platform for public infrastructure service
  • Terremark introduced its private cloud offering built on VMware’s hypervisor
  • Sungard and CSC are using the vBlock architecture (based on VMware) for their cloud offerings
  • Savvis has chosen VMware for its Symphony Dedicated cloud
  • IBM is investing in a KVM-based public cloud offering
  • Amazon Web Services are based on proprietary implementation of open source Xen
  • GoGrid prefers the Xen hypervisor
  • HP proclaimed support for KVM/OpenStack for public cloud services
  • OpenStack announced large technology providers such as IBM, Yahoo, HP, AT&T, Dell, Cisco, and Canonical becoming platinum and gold members of OpenStack Foundation. Citrix, a supporter of OpenStack until a few weeks back, bemoaned that it is “tired” of the speed of evolution of OpenStack, and thus gave its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation. Though market watchers may say that Citrix made the move because OpenStack was perceived as being inclined towards the open source KVM hypervisor rather than Citrix’s  XenServer (a commercial hypervisor by Citrix based on open source Xen)
  • Amazon partnered with Eucalyptus, another open source cloud platform, for hybrid cloud computing thus giving Eucalyptus a big boost as a cloud platform
  • VMware claims there are over 100 providers across 24 countries that offer cloud services based on its technologies. Large enterprise technology providers have partnered with VMware for various cloud offerings
  • Similar providers (e.g., Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and NEC ) earlier also signed the Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program to offer private cloud

Therefore, as happens in enterprise IT, large providers are partnering with all the known players to offer services across different markets, technologies, and customer type. It is evident that the large enterprise providers are choosing commercial platforms for private cloud and open source for public cloud offerings. Unfortunately, this whole muddle of messages have left buyers in an increasingly dense smoke cloud of confusion regarding vendor lock-in, maturity of technologies, reliable support for platforms, services around cloud, etc.

Granted, the implementation architecture of these cloud platforms/hypervisors are in some respects similar, yet the way they handle files, storage, virtual LANs, etc., have sometimes subtle and other times very evident differences.  Customers need different tools and resources to manage these myriad of platforms, hypervisors, and technologies.

However, the premise of cloud was based on standardization and simplicity, wherein customers were simply supposed to self-provision their infrastructure needs irrespective of the underlying platform, and manage it with minimal effort. But the ecosystem doesn’t seem to be evolving in that manner. Rather, it appears to be becoming more confusing and a personal dual between technologists and supremacy of technology than an attempt to improve enterprise IT delivery. Indeed, with so much variation in cloud middleware, how can we expect simplicity and standardization? Which leads to the all important question, will the cloud end up being another technology silo or will it transform the enterprise IT landscape?

To cut through this complex maze of intertwined offerings, buyers must understand the nuances of different cloud technologies, including their impact, limitations, costs, and use specific to their own ecosystem. Approaching it in this manner, the cloud can be a real game changer. Providers will keep on overselling and hyping up their offerings and the buyers require relevant skills to evaluate these offerings for their requirements.

Of course, this is easier said than done. While it’s a given that the enterprise technology world can never be imagined to have a single technology, system, or innovation, and differences will always prevail, there is a dire need to simplify the entire cloud paradigm in terms of its architecture, standards, implementation, usage, and evolution. Too many complexities may scare buyers, and the industry may miss out on exploiting a once-in-a-generation idea.

Will Platform Wars Freeze the Enterprise IaaS Market? | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

As we work with our clients to understand the implications of Next Generation IT technologies, it’s clear that large enterprise adoption of public cloud IaaS is progressing more slowly than other types of cloud services (e.g., SaaS, private cloud). When we ask ourselves “why,” we continue to come back to three critical issues:

  • Vision and reality gap – we continue to be impressed with the sophistication that many of our client IT executives have around how private, public and hybrid clouds can be used to fundamentally transform their IT infrastructures. They then talk to vendors and face the disappointing gap between the state of cloud technologies today and their expectations and requirements (legitimate or not).
  • Risk aversion – it’s one thing for a CIO to passively support their VP of Sales as they roll out Salesforce.com.  It’s quite another to own the decision to migrate critical IT workloads out of the data center to public cloud services. While early adopters are clearly out there experimenting with IaaS, don’t expect your typical Fortune 500 CIO to be eager to get on the diving board and jump in until they have to, or they feel it’s safe.
  • Market “noise” – just when CIOs think the drumbeat of vendor provider announcements around public, private and hybrid cloud offerings and standards can’t get any louder, someone dials it up a notch.  The noise (and uncertainty) is now being amplified even further by the emerging battle around enterprise cloud platforms / operating systems like vCloud and Open Stack (more on this later).

Certainly we’re finding that these issues are reflected in enterprise IaaS adoption patterns that are not quite what many in the enterprise CSP vendor community had hoped for at this point. Namely we’re seeing:

  • Enterprises growing cloud usage from the “inside out” – nearly all the activity we see in the enterprise market around cloud and infrastructure today is focused around private cloud pilots or full deployments (hosted or on-prem). Rather than experiment with cloud with public service providers, they’re opting to try the model internally first. Some call it “server-hugging,” others a reactive move to keep IT spend in house, and still others a rational response to the current state of technology and services.
  • Heavy reliance on proprietary enterprise IT vendors – despite their vision, promise and industry support, new open source platforms (and Eucalyptus) have seen limited adoption in enterprise private clouds. While OpenStack has had success with service providers, many CIOs don’t consider it ready for prime-time yet in their data centers. CloudStack has had more success, but enterprise deployments still likely number only in the double digits. Perhaps not surprisingly we see enterprise cloud deployments (private cloud) dominated by VMware and IBM.
  • Selective, incremental migration of targeted use cases – where we do see enterprise IT migrating to public cloud or hybrid infrastructure models is for very targeted or smaller scale, lower risk use cases. Examples include test / dev environments, backup and archival, websites and batch data analytics. IT is dipping their “toe in the water” with public cloud, and not feeling a compelling need to drive widescale transformation – yet.

So where are we headed?

In general, enterprises are obviously not comfortable with the current risk / return profile associated with public IaaS and hybrid cloud models. We believe one of the few levers that would pull both components of this ratio would be a cloud management platform that would enable true workload portability / interoperability and policy enforcement across private, public and hybrid models. Not surprisingly, competing enterprise cloud vendor platforms, standards and ecosystems are emerging around VMware, Open Stack and Amazon (and to a limited extent Microsoft) to address this market gap. Several major announcements over the past several weeks that have served both to partially clarify and muddy this evolving landscape at the same time include:

  • The Amazon / Eucalyptus announcement around extended  API compatibility for hybrid clouds
  • The Citrix announcement that they will be breaking away from Open Stack and open sourcing CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation
  • HP’s announcement of the Converged Cloud portfolio of public, private and hybrid cloud offerings based on a “hardened” version of OpenStack and KVM.

Most major enterprise IT vendors are still hedging their bets and publicly keeping feet in multiple camps. With the marketing engines in overdrive it’s difficult to understand what commitments vendors are really at the end of the day making to the different platforms. In fact it’s quite instructive to take a look at who’s putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to open source efforts like Open Stack, not just in terms of sponsorship fees but also developer contributions.

Historically IT platform markets end up with a dominant leader and one to two credible challengers that end up with 2/3 to 3/4 of the market, with the remainder shared among niche players. When we take a look at the enterprise cloud operating system or management platform market, we don’t see why it would be any different here, though we’re obviously still a long, long way from the end game.

The critical question in our mind is: Is a cloud platform market shakeout required for enterprise adoption of IaaS to accelerate and hit the tipping point? If so, we could be waiting a long time.

What are your thoughts?

Using Cloud Flexibility to Drive Enterprise-Class Cost Efficiencies – A Tale from the Frontlines | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Myth

One of the current mantras that many enterprise cloud enthusiasts are chanting is that “it’s not about cost.” Cloud is all about business agility and flexibility with cost being an interesting side benefit, but not necessarily compelling on its own. Focusing on cost efficiency and TCO is indicative of a stodgy, legacy IT mindset that doesn’t understand the true paradigm shift of cloud.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we’re finding that some of the more interesting cloud enterprise use cases these days involve leveraging cloud agility to aggressively reduce infrastructure and IT costs.

Take a recent client of ours, a Fortune 500 global energy company seeking to reduce corporate IT infrastructure costs. Its focus was on reducing costs across two primary datacenters that delivered HR, finance, accounting, operations and other applications to business operations across 30 countries. Understanding cloud options for migrating its SAP deployment was a central focus of their effort.

Facing an imminent and significant hardware upgrade cycle, it was more interested in exploring opportunities to reduce costs through traditional IT outsourcing (ITO) vehicles, as well as next generation, cloud-enabled delivery models. Critical objectives included:

  • Reducing asset ownership
  • “Variabilizing” its IT cost structure
  • Outsourcing commodity IT skills

Based on these requirements, our client evaluated potential solution options from nearly 20 service providers, including traditional enterprise IT service providers, cloud service providers (CSPs), offshore ITO vendors and telcos/carriers.

Our client narrowed the field to three potential solution providers, each with different recommendations on where to migrate existing applications and workloads (which were largely in dedicated and virtualized models). Recommended solutions varied not just across cloud delivery model (public vs. private), but also across asset ownership (on-prem private vs. hosted and virtual private):

Cloud Providers Solution Overview

And what did the client find? As shown below, leveraging a mix of virtual private and public cloud models offered the opportunity to reduce its annual infrastructure costs by over 30 percent!  “Provider A,” which suggested migrating approximately 30 percent of the clients’ workloads to public cloud environments ended up with the most compelling business case. While they recommended migrating 80 percent of the workload portfolio to cloud-enabled models, they did recommend keeping the client SAP instances in a traditional, dedicated model.

IT Infrastructure Annual Cost

Some additional observations:

  • Costs reflect all required migration and replatforming investments
  • Public cloud costs were indicative of current market pricing generally at the same unit price levels across the period. As shown by the recent AWS price drop of up to 37 percent on reserved instances, this is a very conservative assumption
  • Efficiencies do not reflect additional potential opportunities from active workload management

So where did the savings come from? Our client found that the savings were driven by four primary levers:

  • Consolidation and rationalization of underutilized servers
  • Migration of unpredictable and “spiky” workloads to public cloud models with consumption-based billing
  • Reduced IT operations and management costs
  • Defacto outsourcing of maintenance and support to CSPs

We’re seeing similar results across our other clients, who are finding that cloud-enabled delivery models, leveraged correctly, can drive substantial and lasting reduction in IT infrastructure costs.

Maybe cloud and cost efficiency aren’t so boring after all…

Is your Company on the “Observer,” “Opportunist,” “Solutioner” – or another – Cloud Adoption Path? | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Wondering where, how, and why CIOs and enterprises are adopting cloud, and what they’re doing to make cloud services a practical reality in their organizations? If so, you’re not alone. The reality is that significant confusion exists among both CIOs and cloud service providers (CSPs) around what’s really happening in the enterprise market. And this is understandable, as the variables in and dynamics of the cloud market are truly unprecedented.

But our recent discussions with over 50 CIOs and IT executives at Global 2000 organizations have demonstrated that a set of enterprise cloud adoption paths are beginning to emerge, each of which is driven by variations on a number of dimensions.

Here’s how we characterize the companies following each of these new paths to the cloud:

Observers

These enterprises are taking a “we’ll get there when we’re ready” stance on cloud adoption. While IT executives in these organizations recognize the agility, flexibility, and cost benefits of cloud models, they do not feel a compelling business or IT need exists to begin migration today. Indeed, instead of proactive exploration, they are more comfortable waiting for an adoption trigger.

Opportunists

In these organizations, cloud is primarily opportunistic business unit (BU) or functional adoption of SaaS applications and collaboration tools. The IT groups in these organizations largely believe that although valuable, cloud services are evolutionary, and just another tool in the toolkit, and there is little, if any, centralized management or governance.

Solutioners

These enterprises are more systematically approaching cloud adoption by identifying, prioritizing, and deploying cloud for use cases particularly well-suited for public or private cloud delivery models. In these organizations, both IT and BUs (sometimes collaboratively) are pursuing a programmatic approach to migration. The focus is not on developing a comprehensive strategy across the entire application or workload portfolio, but rather on identifying “low hanging fruit” for use cases that can deliver immediate, demonstrable impact.

Transformers

Enterprises following this path are leveraging cloud technologies to drive wide-scale IT transformation or modernization programs across their complete application and workload portfolio. CIOs in these enterprises are seen as change agents seeking to transform the responsiveness and delivery capabilities of their IT organizations, are working to understand and assess the governance, management, and integration implications of cloud migration, and actively designing solutions to support their next generation IT organization.

Providers

These enterprising enterprises are seeking to leverage private cloud platforms and technologies to create internal cloud service marketplaces, essentially building their own internal-use equivalents of Amazon Web Services. They are looking to transform not only their IT infrastructure but also their IT business models. In conjunction with private cloud deployments, they are also implementing (or expanding) their use of cloud service catalogs and chargeback models. While on the surface it may appear that this is just implementation of traditional IT service management (ITSM) models, the difference is that IT is now facing real competition from external CSPs for the budget dollars of their BU customers.

On which path is your enterprise? Was it your intention to be on that path, or were you driven there by unintentional factors?  To learn more about the characteristics of these cloud adoption paths, and the implications CIOs must consider to drive desired levels of adoption and ensure success, please read our recently-released Executive Point of View Paper, “Emerging Enterprise Cloud Adoption Paths: The Journey is the Destination.”

Enterprise Cloud Goes Vertical | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Most enterprise cloud offering conversations to date have focused on the horizontal benefits…flexibility, scalability, auto scaling, cost savings, reliability, security, self provisioning, etc.

Advantageous as these are, CIOs are increasingly interested in learning more about cloud benefits that are specific to the industry in which their organizations operate. For example, latency requirements, failover mechanism and data encryption are important to a CIO in the financial industry. A healthcare industry IT executive will be interested in hearing more about mobility and data archiving. How the cloud can improve supply chain or logistics is important for a CIO in manufacturing industry. And a media industry IT executive, quite aware of the various platforms being used to access content, will want to hear more about Content Delivery Networks (CDN) supported by the cloud.

A growing number of enterprise cloud providers are beginning to understand this interest in vertical cloud benefits. While their focus has been on “SaaS-i-fying” their offerings to meet unique, industry-specific application requirements, the trend will continue towards “PaaS-i-fying” and even “IaaS-i-fying” their offerings.

Let’s take a quick look at some of today’s verticalized enterprise cloud offerings.

IBM’s Federal Community Cloud is dynamic and scalable to meet government organizations’ consolidation policies as mandated by the Obama administration’s CIO. It is in the process of obtaining FedRAMP certification to meet Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance standards, a requirement for government IT contractors, and will be operated and maintained in accordance with federal security guidelines.

Savvis provides customized IaaS solutions that cater to the financial industry. Growth in this vertical has been led by providing infrastructure services – such as proximity hosting and low latency networks – which support electronic trading. Savvis has added six new trading venues and an international market data provider. Its customers can now cross-connect, or have network access, to over 59 exchanges, Electronic Communication Networks (ECNs), and market data providers. For example, it hosts Barclays Capital’s dark liquidity crossing network, LX, which aggregates its global client bases’ market structure investments.

Infosys took advantage of Microsoft Azure PaaS platform and its SQL Data Services (SDS) to provide automotive dealers with cloud-based solutions to go from a point-to-point dealer connection for inventory management to a hub-based approach. In this solution, an inventory database for all dealers is hosted at a dedicated instance of SDSin the cloud. It provides middle tier code and business logic to integrate data between participating parties and a web-based interface for dealer employees wanting to check inventory at other dealerships.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has cloud solutions that cater to the media industry’s needs for transcoding, analytics, rendering, and digital asset management. It developed a CDN, based on CloudFront™, which provides the streaming from edge nodes strategically located throughout the United States for a robust streaming experience.

AWS’ Gov Cloud™ provides a cloud computing platform that meets the federal security compliances FISMA, PCI, DCC and ISO 27001. The Department of State and its prime contractor, MetroStar Systems, built an online video contest platform to encourage discussion and participation around cultural topics, and to promote membership in its ExchangesConnect network. The contest drew participants from more than 160 countries and took advantage of AWS for scalability. AWS hosts websites for many federal agencies such as the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (recovery.gov) and the U.S. Department of Treasury (treasury.gov). AWS provides multiple failover locations within the United States, a provision which meets the security requirement that only people physically located within the United States have access the data.

Game hosting companies are running their games in the cloud for faster delivery and scalability. And AWS’ S3 platform provides the storage capacities for gaming companies such as Zynga and Playfish.

GNAX’s healthcare cloud specifically caters to the healthcare industry and understands the nuances of HIPPA. It provides a private cloud solution to healthcare companies that scales up and down depending on patient volume.

Of course, there are both pros and cons to adopting vertical-specific cloud offerings.

Pros:

  • Customized solutions based on industry regulations
  • Immediate creation of competitive advantage

Cons:

  • Vendor lock-in
  • Proprietary workloads may not be migrated

These issues can be mitigated through a careful sourcing methodology, now being provided through cloud agents who negotiate the contracts with multiple vendors as per the needs of the client organization.

As illustrated above, there are significant benefits to be gained from industry-specific cloud solutions, and I predict we’ll see an increasing number of them emerging in the near-term.

Enterprise CIOs Get no Cloud Satisfaction from Incumbent Vendors | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Enterprises are frustrated when it comes to cloud migration, and it appears they have good reason to be.

During the past three months, we have had conversations with IT and executive leadership in upwards of 50 Global 2000 firms that rely on distributed, global IT operations. These companies operate dozens of data centers running hundreds of workloads that support tens – or hundreds – of thousands of employees around the world.

Our discussions covered three basic topics related to their migration path from dedicated and virtual infrastructures to cloud. Their answers revealed disappointment and a growing sense of frustration with the incumbent vendors that built their global network of data centers. And their comments suggest a major misalignment of technology and marketing, as well as a potentially huge opportunity for disruption by new competitors in enterprise cloud.

1.     “Tell us about the conversations you’re having with your incumbent equipment and software vendors about next generation IT migration.”

IT leadership stated that vendors are “stuck in technology speak,” focusing on their latest version of private cloud rather than demonstrating reference installations that support a business case. They also reported frustration at how each vendor defines cloud terminology differently, making rational comparisons impossible. Market noise has become deafening, creating distractions for their IT staffs that are trying to cut through the cloudwashing and map out a cloud migration strategy.

Perhaps most troubling is that these enterprises reported that their incumbent vendors are focusing on technology, with little to no focus on business value.

2.     “Are you impressed with what they’re telling you?”

Despite the answer to the first question, the CIOs told us they are impressed in select cases, primarily with vendors that have developed vertical-specific solutions to address data privacy, security and compliance issues.

For the most part, however, the IT professionals we spoke with reported seeing lots of impressive slide decks with long-term cloud visions, but receiving unsatisfactory answers about the ability to execute in the short-term.

They also cited transparency of security and controls as a major issue. Those we spoke with require a level of visibility into solution performance that their incumbent vendors are simply unable to deliver.

3.     “What action plan have you developed with your legacy vendor?”

Here’s where it became apparent that incumbent vendors are missing the mark.

While it seems obvious that vendors would recommend their own solutions, enterprise buyers want objectivity when it comes to the cloud. “Vendors guide us to their own solutions,” and “their incentives to do so are apparent,” were consistent themes. Consequently, enterprise buyers are not relying on one vendor when it comes to cloud migration action plans, even if their incumbent is a Tier 1 ITO vendor.

This seems to be a direct result of enterprise buyers’ frustration with the lack of direct answers regarding what is available for deployment today, and what is merely a toolkit or development environment.

There’s not much improvement when talking about native cloud providers. Several people noted that while these vendors are able to bring ready-to-wear solutions to the table, their experience bases are either with the developer community or with service providers, but not enterprises. This experience gap raises questions among enterprise IT leadership regarding these providers’ ability to provide a seamless implementation and ongoing support.

We drew several important conclusions from these conversations:

  1. Vendor “over-marketing” in the race to grab cloud share is confusing the market, and may actually be slowing adoption by introducing risk and doubt among enterprise buyers. This became apparent when several CIOs told us they have essentially black listed some of their incumbent vendors from further conversations about their cloud migration strategies.
  2. We’re seeing a surprising volume of Global 2000 enterprises – most prominently in the U.S. and Europe – issuing RFPs for complete outsourcing of their data centers to IaaS providers. Of course, this does not mean they’re going to do it, but the aggressiveness with which they’re exploring the option points to a fundamental dissatisfaction with the ability of their trusted partners to deliver them to the cloud.
  3. The next issue to contend with is organizational and cultural readiness within the enterprise IT function. CIOs are aware of this, they’re concerned about it, and they don’t see any reliable best practices to guide them.

It’s clear to us that incumbent vendors have stumbled, leaving the door to the enterprise CIO’s office open. Opportunity awaits providers that can bring ready-to-deploy cloud solutions to the enterprise, backed by vertical market experience and an ability to assist with cultural transformation.

Enterprise Cloud Migration: What if We’re All Wrong? | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

This blog originally appeared on Sandhill.com. Read the original post.


Current conventional wisdom suggests that enterprise adoption of cloud services will accelerate as service providers and offerings become more “mature” and “enterprise friendly.” Adoption will grow and extend beyond initial test/dev website, and backup use cases as enterprises become more comfortable with cloud services. The common belief is that, over time, cloud will in fact become a strategic component of most IT environments but that it will be a decade-long (if not longer) transition. Most also believe that data security, privacy, and audit issues significantly constrain some verticals such as healthcare and financial services from effectively migrating in the near term, particularly to cloud platform and infrastructure services.

But as we discover far too frequently, conventional wisdom often turns out to be quite wrong. While adoption rates for new technologies tend to be overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term, it’s an interesting exercise to think about the factors and unexpected developments that could dramatically accelerate enterprise migration to the public cloud.

Let’s consider some of the basic assumptions many in the market make around enterprise and the cloud.

What if enterprises architect around SLAs?

The terms of many current cloud service provider SLAs are effectively meaningless. The burden of proof often falls on the user to fully document service interruptions and outages. Even if proven, compensation for violations often equates to a slap on the wrist at best. But what if enterprises come to the conclusion that SLAs are the wrong way to think about ensuring availability?

The highly visible Amazon outage in its Northern Virginia data center in April resulted in significant interruption and service degradation for users of Quora and FourSquare, while other websites and companies appeared to suffer no impact. The reason? Availability through redundancy. Rather than relying on SLAs, many unaffected companies simply architected redundancy through failover approaches that rolled to other Amazon data centers or service providers. What if enterprises decide that pushing cloud service providers on SLAs is akin to beating a dead horse and, instead, simply decide to take the SLAs as a given and architect around them?

What if enterprises standardize to conform to cloud service provider offerings?

Enterprises historically have been addicted to IT customization – both in what they buy, and how they buy it. Service providers that weren’t willing to modify offerings, pricing, or contract terms for large enterprise buyers were quickly shown the door. Many believe that enterprises will never migrate to cloud services that are essentially “take it or leave it” propositions to the customer.

Yet in many cases, enterprises have driven customization in processes, applications, and services that in fact add little or no business value. Cloud is opening many enterprises’ eyes to the fact that there may in fact be significant value in using cloud services as a lever to drive standardization across the organization, particularly for non-strategic applications and processes.

What if enterprises learn to live with standardization and limited configuration, and dramatically streamline support for non-strategic applications and assets?

What if data security and privacy issues are mitigated?

Data residency, security, and privacy issues are providing significant cloud migration constraints for some global enterprises, particularly those in compliance-sensitive verticals like healthcare and financial services. But what if these barriers were significantly reduced or fully eliminated?

Salesforce.com recently gave a glimpse into one way this may happen through the recent announcement of its Data Residency Option (DRO), which gives customers the ability to keep data on-premise behind their firewall while providing encrypted access to the Salesforce.com cloud application. Some cloud infrastructure service providers, like Savvis and Rackspace, offer dedicated hosting and private/public cloud services in the same data center, enabling hybrid models that support data “ownership” and the benefits of dynamic bursting into public cloud models.

While enterprise customers are seeking more transparency, Amazon has in fact achieved compliance with FISMA, HIPAA and PCI DSS and other standards. Some in the audit community are also discussing the need to reexamine common policies and controls in light of cloud services and architectures. The net net? Data security, privacy, and residency issues may end up being addressed faster than expected. What would happen to adoption if these concerns were taken off the table?

What if pricing for common IaaS services drops by 50 percent?

To date, cloud service providers have very effectively used private cloud economics as a pricing umbrella for their public cloud services. The result? Highly attractive margins for current cloud providers and an onrush of new providers. If microeconomics holds here (and I don’t know why it wouldn’t), pricing for public cloud infrastructure services will begin to drop, and potentially dramatically. Amazon has already established a pattern of driving consistent reductions in pricing for its core cloud services. What will happen when new entrants get aggressive in trying to grab share? The enterprise business case ROI for cloud service migration could be much more compelling in the very near future.

What if mission-critical applications migrate first?

The assumption is that adoption of cloud applications starts at the edge with line-of-business and functional applications and then, over time, migrates to more strategic and mission-critical applications. But what if CIOs determine to go in the opposite direction?

Examples exist of large global enterprises that have migrated to cloud service providers that offer hosted private cloud SAP ERP services in conjunction with community cloud spiking environments. While the common belief is that mission-critical apps will be the final frontier for enterprise cloud migration, what if it turns out to be the first?

All of these scenarios are unlikely to play out as described, but we can be sure that the conventional wisdom will be wrong in a market that is evolving as rapidly as enterprise cloud. Current expectations for the rate and pace of adoption are based largely on past trends in enterprise technology, which is probably a bad assumption in itself. It is increasingly clear that adoption curves for new enterprise technologies are actually accelerating.

I bet my money that the pace of enterprise cloud adoption will surprise many … it will be interesting to see what unexpected scenarios might open up the floodgates.

Live from Bangalore – the NASSCOM IMS Summit, September 21 | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

CIOs, service providers, analysts, and the business media rubbed shoulders on the power-packed first day of the NASSCOM Infrastructure Management Summit (IMS) in Bangalore. This year’s conference has the twin themes of Enterprise Mobility and Cloud Computing, with one day dedicated to each, which seems to lead to a more focused set of discussions than a super broad-based event that leaves you struggling to absorb all of what you just heard.

After the welcome address and keynote speech from Som Mittal, President of NASSCOM, and Pradeep Kar, Chairman of the NASSCOM RIM Forum, we settled in for a series of insightful presentations and panel discussions with global technology leaders.

BMC CEO Robert E. Beauchamp spoke about how the parallel paradigms of cloud, consumerization, and communication (yes, I am in alliteration mode today) require CIOs to think of a unified approach to service management. Of particular interest were Beauchamp’s insights on how different service providers are trying to interpret the cloud differently in an attempt to a) disintermediate the competition; b)  avoid being disintermediated; or c) both a and b.

IBM’s interpretation of the cloud: The cloud is all the bundled hardware, software, and middleware we have always sold to you, but now you can buy the whole stack yourself instead of us having to sell it to you.

Google’s counter: Who cares about the hardware anyway? We will buy the boxes from Taiwan – cheaper and better. It’s about what you do with it, and that’s where we come in…again.

VMWare chips in: You already own the hardware – and we will tell you how best to make use of it.

Beauchamp sees more than one way of “belling the cloud cat,” and CIOs need to figure out which direction to take based on their legacy environments, security requirements, and cost imperatives. (“Belling the cloud cat” is my take-off on a fable titled Belling the Cat. It means attempting, or agreeing to perform, an impossibly difficult task.)

As for service providers, he also foresees successful survivors and spectacular failures as the cloud conundrum disrupts traditional business models.

Mark Egan, VMWare CIO spoke about how consumerization and cloud computing are nullifying the efficacy of traditional IT management tools. According to Egan, IT needs to move from a “we’ll place an agent on the device” mode to a “heuristics” mode of analyzing data in order to prevent every CIO’s security nightmare from coming true in a consumerized enterprise.

Next up, Brian Pereira, Editor, InformationWeek, and Chandra Gnanasambandam, Partner, McKinsey, inspired us with real stories about how mobility is transforming the lives of unbanked villagers, saving billions of dollars worth of healthcare expenditure, and improving and optimizing the enterprise supply chain.

Here’s a gem of an insight: Do you know what most urban workers in the Philippines, Vietnam, or India do if they need to transfer money to parents living in rural areas? They buy a train ticket. Then they call Mum and Dad, share the ticket number, and ask them to go to the local railway station, cancel the ticket and collect the refund (minus a small cancellation fee). Wow – that’s what I call consumer-led innovation!

To summarize today’s sessions:

  • While many discussions highlighted the correctness of what Everest Group analysts are already predicting, it was invaluable to get validation on what we suspected, complete with more live examples.
  • Cloud and enterprise mobility are here to stay. With the momentum behind them – unlike other hyped up technologies – these are being demanded by the consumer, not dumped on them. And that is always going to mean something.
  • Service providers and CIOs need to evolve. In themselves, cloud and mobility do not represent a threat. But it’s a lot of change. And the threat lies in how CIOs, and their service providers, gauge the pace of the change, and react to it.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow, I share a panel with CSC and Microland to discuss “Trigger points – Driving traditional datacenter to private cloud.” Right now I’m heading off the gym in an attempt to burn all the calories I’ve put on during the day, thanks to the excellent food. Stay tuned!

Evolving Cloud, Evolving Advisory Role | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Avid readers of this blog can tell by now that Everest Group is excited to participate and contribute to the market discussion on the impact of the rapidly evolving cloud industry. We get tremendous satisfaction from both the online and in-person conversations our blog topics have generated in the last year and promise to continue to contribute our informed viewpoints with continued enthusiasm.

Enterprise IT leaders we talk with every day find themselves at a crossroads. The cloud revolution is nearing an inflection point, promising to radically transform the way IT services are delivered. At the same time, there is an equally strong “echo chamber” effect in which promises and benefits are refracted through various service provider prisms, creating a significant challenge in separating what’s possible from unhelpful hyperbole. Additionally, the focus in the current market tends to be on the ever-evolving technology upgrades and releases of various cloud components, which leaves most CIOs in the dark when it comes time to try and sell the economic benefits of cloud technology to their key internal stakeholders.

IT organizations have had enough theory and are ready to start working in more practical terms:

  • How do we transform the provision of IT services to our business to meet its needs more effectively?
  • How do we build a strategy to get us there?
  • What does the financial case look like to achieve our desired outcomes?

We’re excited to share the vision of our Next Generation IT Practice with you, because we believe it to be the natural evolution from our current practice of assisting Global 1000 firms drive greater operational efficiency. Our expertise allows us to help transform IT organizations to strengthen both their long-term strategic and economic positions by leveraging the next generation of technologies.

Our vision for this new practice is simple: provide a bridge between strategic direction and technical execution for IT transformation without bias towards the desired end state. We believe this is where the current advisory market falls short and Everest Group can add the most value.

Our Next Generation IT team is successfully able to:

  • Build on existing experience helping large IT clients develop strategies
  • Leverage our breadth of research on the service providers’ strengths and weaknesses
  • Adopt a time-tested methodology to include next-generation technologies
  • Utilize our business case modeling skills to construct a versatile tool for helping assess transformation economics in a way that is unique in the marketplace

We cannot wait to share more details about how our team at Everest Group has helped clients develop a roadmap towards transformation in the coming weeks, so that we can continue to contribute thought leadership in this space.


Learn details about how our Cloud Transformation and Next Generation IT offerings can help your organization achieve the strategic value it’s seeking.

Procure-to-Pay: Measuring Outcome Beyond Efficiency Gains | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

More and more companies are recognizing the value of end-to-end business process management as it breaks down functional and organizational silos to enable a more holistic approach to enterprise performance management.

Of the common sets of end-to-end processes – which include Source-to-Contract (S2C), Procure-to-Pay (P2P), Order-to-Cash (O2C), Record-to-Report (R2R), and Hire-to-Retire (H2R) – P2P is most often identified as the priority for optimization. There are two key drivers of this trend. First, compared to other end-to-end processes, P2P activities are typically more common across the enterprise, making them easier to standardize. Second, the business case for P2P is frequently the most compelling. Through process standardization, workflow automation, system integration, and rigorous compliance enforcement, companies have been able to achieve rapid and significant spend and operating cost savings while simultaneously gaining the ability to better manage risk.

A case in point: a global software and products company achieved an initial operating cost reduction of 35 percent. It subsequently realized spend savings of US$700 million (~9 percent on a spend base of US$8 billion) and captured more than US$10M in Early Payment Discounts (EPD). The savings and benefits accrued generated a break-even on the business case in less than six months.

Based on Everest Group’s experience, one of the most critical success factors of P2P transformation is the institutionalization of a common set of well-defined performance metrics across the entire organization, including both internal and third party delivery partners. The performance metrics should be closely linked to desired business outcomes, and applicable across segments and geographies. Moreover, both P2P efficiency and effectiveness should be easily quantified, measured, and benchmarked.

The table below presents a P2P metrics framework that starts with clearly defined business objectives that are measured by a small set of outcome-based metrics to reflect the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the P2P process. The diagnostic measures are designed to identify specific process breakdowns and improvement opportunities, and are tracked and reported at the operational level.

P2P Metrics Framework

 

We strongly recommend companies follow a structured approach to develop a holistic P2P performance management framework:

  1. Define common metrics, and clearly delineate objectives, descriptions, and interdependencies with other performance measures
  2. Establish a standard methodology and systems to track and report performance; key components include:
    • Measurement scope, parameters, method, data source, and frequency
    • Benchmarking methodology and data source
    • Reporting dashboards, frequency, and forum
  3. Assign accountability for:
    • Measuring and tracking performance metrics
    • Benchmarking and reporting overall P2P performance
    • Identifying and prioritizing continuous improvement (CI) opportunities
    • Reviewing and approving CI projects
    • Implementing and monitoring CI initiatives
    • Calibrating performance metrics based on evolving business objectives

There’s no question that the old management adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” holds true in the case of end-to-end process management. Having a common set of appropriately-designed performance metrics is both an enabler for and indicator of successful P2P transformation.

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