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cloud adoption, Europe, News & Analysis, Research, UK

Mounting frustration with cloud technology is stifling adoption – research

An influential group of senior business executives is being disillusioned by experiences with cloud hosted applications, according to new research. The proportions, though relatively low, are growing as cloud disenchantment threatens to set in.

The revelations come from research by cloud service provider Stratogen. Its main finding was that the expense, the lack of both applications and support and the downtime involved are all disappointing the company decision makers who backed cloud computing in their companies.

If news of the disenchantment spreads among the business community, the bad feedback could nip cloud growth in the bud, according to Karl Robinson, chief commercial officer at StratoGen. “The research highlights a major problem for cloud technology,” said Robinson, “It is clear UK businesses today have a distinct lack of confidence in the cloud’s ability to deliver the benefits it is capable of.”

The study, conducted independently by Arlington Research, involved a survey of 1000 senior business executives. Around three quarters (74 per cent) of the survey group reported day to day frustrations with using cloud hosted applications.

The main complaint for 20 per cent of the study group was the high cost of their cloud applications. Another minority (17 per cent) complained about the lack of available cloud applications. The lack of IT support was mentioned by 16 per cent of the survey and one tenth of those surveyed were not happy with the amount of downtime.

As a result, a minority of the survey group (17 per cent of the business leaders quizzed) are concerned that their cloud systems are preventing their company from growing. Around the same proportion (14 per cent) are worried that downtime is affecting employee productivity and creating a loss of company earnings.

Though these are complaints from a small minority, the survey figures seem to indicate that their influence is disproportionally high, since 33 per cent of the business leaders say they are now ready to remove their business off the cloud completely. A further 31 per cent are also considering a cloud exodus.

“The perceived high cost of cloud hosting is a direct result of the unexpected metered costs businesses are all too often hit with,” said Robinson, “migration challenges and the time invested in integrating cloud technology with legacy applications can further increase the cost of cloud computing.”

Analytics, Big Data, Hadoop, News & Analysis, SAP, Telco Cloud, Vora

SAP announces improvements to cloud platform and Vora analytics software

SAP HANA VoraSAP has released new software that it claims will make analytics easier for users of open source Hadoop software.

The SAP HANA Vora is a new in-memory query engine that improves the performance of the Apache Spark execution framework. As a result, anyone running data analysis should be able to get better interactions with their data if it’s held on Hadoop and companies will benefit from more useful intelligence.

SAP claims this new software will overcome the general ‘lack of business process awareness’ that exists in companies across enterprise apps, analytics, big data and Internet of Things (IoT) sources. The software will make it easier for data scientists and developers to get access to the right information by simplifying the access to corporate and Hadoop data.

SAP HANA Vora will bring most benefit in industries where Big Data analytics in business process context is paramount. SAP identified financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing as target markets. The savings created by the new software will come from a number of areas, it said. In the financial sector, the return on investment in the systems will come from mitigating risk and fraud by detecting new anomalies in financial transactions and customer history data.

Telecoms companies will benefit from optimising their bandwidth, SAP claims, as telcos use the software to analyse traffic patterns to avoid network bottlenecks and improve the quality of service. Manufacturers will benefit from preventive maintenance and improved product re-call processes as a result of SAL HANA Vora’s newly delivered powers of analysis of bills-of-material, services records and sensor data.

The use of Hadoop and SAP HANA to manage large unstructured data sets left room for improvement, according to user Aziz Safa, Intel IT Enterprise Applications and Application Strategy VP. “One of the key requirements is better analyses of big data,” said Safa, “but mining these large data sets for contextual information in Hadoop is a challenge.”

SAP HANA Vora will be released by the end of September, when a cloud-based developer edition will also be available. Here’s a SAP vid on the matter.

 


cloud transition, Enterprise IT, Europe, News & Analysis, study, UK

Cloud strategy still tentative for many UK corporations – study

IT managers and CIOs should not feel they’ve missed the boat as the majority of enterprises have only just started their cloud journey, according to a new enterprise study.

If a study of 200 senior IT managers in large public and private sector organisations is an accurate reflection of the nation’s IT, only 3 per cent of enterprises have arrived at their final cloud destination. Not far from half (41 per cent) of IT managers surveyed were categorised as ‘still taking their first tentative steps towards cloud’ by the survey conductor Vanson Bourne. The study, run on behalf of UK cloud services provider Redcentric, also identified another significantly large group (32 per cent) that said they’re only half way to their cloud destination.

The study also identified the five types of personality trait that emerge among IT managers and CIOs as the pressure to adopt cloud technology builds. Five genres of manager were identified – in ascending order of caution – as Experimenters, Evolutionaries, Accelerators, Progressives and Cautionaries.

The relative proportions of these self-identified personality types did not always match the spread of cloud installations, however. Four per cent of cloud managers identified themselves as ‘risk-taking experimenters’ who were ‘willing to accept the ups and downs of moving to the cloud and not entirely sure the direction they will take’. This roughly equated to the proportion of managers (3%) who were satisfied they had completed their cloud journey.

Equal numbers of IT mangers and CIOs saw themselves as Accelerators (16%) who want to move to the cloud as fast as possible and Progressives (16%) who want to use cloud to make bold business changes. Taken together, these categories indicate that 32 per cent of the study group are frustrated in their ambitions for the cloud. This matched exactly the number (32 per cent) of companies that have yet to reach the half way point of their cloud migration.

The majority of the study group (50 per cent) identified themselves as Evolutionary and stated that they take a steady approach where cloud is a natural progression for the business.

There is a significant group of Cautionaries (15 per cent) who are most cynical about cloud overall. However, only 3 per cent of the group have not embarked on cloud projects, which indicates that 12 per cent of IT managers and CIOs have embarked on a cloud migration without having any faith in the technology.

“We wanted to help UK organisations understand where they are and where their journey is likely to take them next,” said Redcentric sales director Andy Mills, “The findings show there is huge untapped potential still to explore.”

Americas, Datacentre, Dell, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, VMware, VMworld

Dell tells VMworld how it simplified the cloud

Dell serversDell claims it will demystify the cloud for enterprise buyers with a raft of new products and services, which it unveiled at VMworld in San Francisco.

A new release of Dell’s Active System Manager will deepen integration with the product portfolio of virtualisation vendor VMware, it claimed, making it easier to automate the management of public and private cloud computing, and hybrids of the two.

“Dell’s portfolio helps customers to design, deploy and manage hybrid clouds from the device to the data centre to meet each customer’s unique journey to a hybrid cloud,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and GM of Engineered Solutions and Cloud, Dell.

Converting public cloud deployments to hybrid cloud environments brings financial returns that have been verified by several independent studies, according to Dell. “Dell’s innovations and our VMware partnership can deliver the business results and outcomes,” said Ganthier.

Meanwhile, an updated version of its Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon Edition will shrink workloads on virtual desktops and applications by up to 80 per cent, Dell claimed. This would cut the price of management and hosting. A new thin client operating system, Wyse ThinOS 8.1, will tighten security and make support easier, it claimed. Another improvement comes from the new version of Wyse Cloud Client Manager (CCM), which extends management to bring millions of Windows Embedded Standard (WES) and SUSE Linux thin clients under the umbrella of its management platforms.

Dell is working with VMware to make virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) easy to create and run, claimed Steve Lalla, Dell’s VP of commercial client software. “Collaboration enables us to deliver these solutions to our customers within VMware Horizon environments,” said Lalla.

One of the productivity shortcuts created by active system manager (ASM) is that any business analyst or IT architect can use templates and automation methods to speed up processes such as requests, approvals, help desk and self-service. The saving of time and manual effort and improved responsiveness and consistency will create rapid payback, claimed Dell.

Dell also claimed it has been ‘deeply involved’ in the joint development – with VMware – of EVO SDDC, which aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify the building of large scale software defined data centres. Dell’s EVO SDDC offerings will align closely with VMware’s general availability in the first half of 2016, said Dell.

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Virtualisation, VMware

VMware opens up at VMworld San Francisco

VMWare campus logoVirtualisation pioneer VMware has unveiled a raft of new services tailored for hybrid cloud services and open systems at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco.

VMware announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0, the company’s second release of its distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software. The new release, based on OpenStack Kilo, will be available on September 30.

“Customers can now upgrade from version one to version two in a more operationally efficient manner and even roll back if anything goes wrong,” said VMware product line manager Arvind Soni.

The move could be seen as a U-turn by VMware, whose revenue streams come from sales of its vSphere virtualization software. The most recent annual VMware report warned that “open source technologies for virtualization, containerization, and cloud platforms such as Xen, KVM, Docker, Rocket, and OpenStack provide significant pricing competition and let competing vendors [use] OpenStack to compete directly with our SDDC initiative.”

However, with OpenStack distributions available from Canonical, HP, Huawei and Oracle – and investment in OpenStack companies from Intel, IBM and other major players, VMware has announced continued support. In October 2014 parent company EMC bought three OpenStack start ups – Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning – to provide a variety of cloud services which adhere to the increasingly popular open standard.

Meanwhile, testing and running disaster recovery plans will be quicker, promises VMWare, now its vCloud Air service has a new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager. The service is now offered on a pay-per-use basis, replacing the more expensive annual subscriptions.

In the event of a disaster recovery event or test, fees will be charged for each virtual machine protected and the storage they consume, said VMware.

Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform. The debut product from VMware’s new Google reseller relationship will be available from September 30th, which will also see an alternative offering launched: vCloud Air Object Storage service, powered by EMC.

The start of the fourth financial quarter should also see VMware release its new vCloud Air SQL database as a service, as the virtualisation vendor looking to match the breadth of features offered the cloud industry’s top service providers.

With a new Hybrid Cloud Manager, VMware aims to help clients to migrate workloads, extend the range of their data centres and fine tune the process of juggling resources between private and public clouds. The management takes place through the interface of VMware’s vSphere Web Client, and will support the migration of virtual machines.

ANZ, Asia Pacific, banking, development, IBM, News & Analysis, Research

IBM signs cloud development agreement with ANZ bank

ANZ has signed a five-year, A$450 million (£208 million) strategic agreement with IBM, the centrepiece of which is the establishment of a cloud-based Innovation Lab based on IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform-as-a-service, reports Banking Technology.

The lab will allow the Bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services at “a fraction of the time and cost previously taken”.

As well as the Innovation Lab and cloud capabilities, the agreement includes access to IBM’s software portfolio and core systems infrastructure. The IBM agreement will provide common platforms across ANZ’s network as it continues to grow as a super-regional bank and will allow the bank to deliver a “more integrated and innovative banking experience for digital customers”.

IBM will deploy its newest z13 mainframe and Power8 infrastructure as part of ANZ’s private cloud environment. The infrastructure will provide the bank with the reliability, security and resiliency needed to service the needs of mobile customers across the bank’s network. IBM integration, content management, data, analytics and cloud software will support ANZ’s core banking and infrastructure needs.

“Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is critical to our business and to providing a superior customer experience,” said Scott Collary, ANZ’s chief information officer. “We therefore need to ensure we’re meeting these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we’re working to achieve this goal.”

IBM has been a strategic partner of ANZ for more than 40 years said Scott Barlow, IBM client director for ANZ Bank: “This new agreement continues to build on this by enabling ANZ access to an arsenal of leading edge technology to provide the agility, speed and innovation essential in the rapidly changing financial services marketplace.”

Interoute, Webinars

Webinar | How to integrate the cloud into your existing IT estate

Interoute_webinar_640x170

 

All businesses are being encouraged to move to the cloud or ‘go digital’, but the reality is that most IT departments have a slew of applications and an established estate. How can the cloud and this existing estate work together?

This webinar brought to you by Business Cloud News and Interoute will take you though some of the typical deployments that we’re seeing with customers’ existing IT estates and the problems they are facing. We will then walk through some of the tools we’ve developed allow you to connect your existing infrastructure to the cloud, enabling you to have a fully integrated estate of old and new.

The key piece to any technical transformation of business is integration and control, an all-encompassing base strategy of consolidation, renewal and integration of old & new. You need to establish a bimodal model of IT, and this session will show you how.

  • Analyse and profile existing IT estates
  • IaaS, PaaS, and what they mean
  • How do your users access your services
  • How to build a platform to link all of your IT
  • How the Interoute platform can help you integrate everything, without changing everything

Speaker: 

William Morrish, Director, Cloud Services, Interoute

William has been working within the network and hosting industry for over 18 years fulfilling roles from technical design to customer sales engagement. He now runs Interoute’s IaaS product globally for sales & marketing.

This webinar will take place on Tuesday 15th September at 4pm UK time.

CLICK HERE to register >

Datacentre, Interoute, Mark Lewis, Networks, News & Analysis, VDC

Interoute opens Trans-Pacific network route between Hong Kong and Los Angeles

Interoute is expanding its fibre network, which will boost its cloud biz

Interoute is expanding its fibre network, which will boost its cloud biz

Interoute has added two new independent networking routes between Los Angeles (LA) and Hong Kong to support what it claims is Europe’s biggest cloud service platform.

It described the additions as ‘the final step in creating a fully meshed global network’. With low latency fibre connecting its territories it claims it gives customers faster access between the USA and Asia regions.

The pan-Pacific services are built on Interoute’s own private MPLS network. With complete ownership of its network, the service provider claims it can guarantee security. The option to choose between one of two distinct routes now gives it much higher levels of reliability, Interoute claimed.

Interoute has integrated its MPLS network with its cloud infrastructure platform Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC). The VDC, announced in November 2014, was created and run globally in order to simplify the process of running businesses in multiple markets.

Today’s announced network expansion follows the launches of the Interoute IP points of presence (PoPs) and VDC zones in Los Angeles (LA1) and Hong Kong (Hong Kong2). This announcement also follows Interoute’s recent opening of a new PoP in Singapore (Singapore3), in a bid to strengthen its position in one of the world’s biggest financial hubs.

“Our investment in new links between Asia and the USA signifies the next stage in the development of Interoute’s global networked cloud,” said Mark Lewis, Interoute’s communications and connectivity VP. “Customers wishing to expand across the globe need a network and services platform that supports their digital businesses.”

The new route goes live in September 2015.

Interoute’s estate now comprises 12 datacentres, 14 virtual datacentres, and 31 collocation centres, with connections to 195 additional third-party datacentres across Europe, where it owns and operates 24 dense city networks.

The new routes will help Interoute strengthen its offering beyond Europe, according to Lewis. “With the launch of these new connections, Interoute is delivering the network capacity and service platforms that enterprises need to grow across the Pacific and around the world.”

Ciber, COBOL, Legacy code, Michael Boustridge, News & Analysis, Pascal, Vendor

Ciber machine will convert Cobol into cloud ready code

Legacy code is keeping enterprises from migrating to the cloud

Legacy code is keeping enterprises from migrating to the cloud

Service provider Ciber claims it has solved one of the most expensive problems in business: upgrading legacy systems to make them secure and cloud friendly.

Its new system, Ciber Momentum, converts the code from languages such as Cobol, Ada and Pascal into a more cloud-ready format. By automating the conversion of machine code into a modern format, the Momentum system creates massive time and money savings on projects that can take up to three years if conducted using human resources, according to Ciber.

Gartner research estimates that companies spend 70 per cent of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems, Ciber claims, leaving only 30 per cent available for new projects. This is because few of the programmers familiar with the languages used to create legacy applications are available for work today.

This means that Cobol writers, for example, are three times as expensive to hire as modern developers and, with few hiring options, companies find it difficult to dictate terms.

Since the conversion of a trading system written in Cobol can take years, this is creating a crippling expense and leaving companies vulnerable to competition from cloud based start ups that can move much faster, Ciber claims. Legacy apps are not only inflexible, they are more likely to be a security liability, said Michael Boustridge, president and chief executive of Ciber.

“Most of the time companies get hacked, the criminals are exploiting vulnerabilities of an old system,” said Boustridge, “legacy computers are not secure.”

Boustridge said Ciber intends to reverse the formula for the industry, so that CIOs will be able to spend 70 per cent of their budgets on new projects and only 30 per cent on maintenance.

The fast-track to the cloud can only be 80 to 85 per cent software generated as some human checking and balancing will be necessary. However, Boustridge claimed that conversion project times will be halved.

The automated system will also uncover any anomalies in legacy coding. These logical inconsistencies were often created by programmers who were notorious for over complicating systems in order to inflate their value to their employers, according to Boustridge. “Anything in the old code that doesn’t add up will be exposed,” said Boustridge.

The system, now on global release, will be available for partners to white label and offer as part of their own client service.

Cisco, IDC, News & Analysis

Businesses want private cloud as revenue enabler says IDC

Cisco says cloud - primarily private cloud - is the key to unlocking new business value

Cisco says cloud – primarily private cloud – is the key to unlocking new business value

Cloud business is moving into a second wave of adoption, according to a global study commissioned by Cisco. Half (53 per cent) the survey group said they expect cloud to raise their revenues in the next two years – with almost as many (44 per cent) identifying private cloud as their chosen enabler.

The lack of private cloud options could be handicapping cloud business, analyst IDC reports, in its Cisco-sponsored Infobrief, “Don’t Get Left Behind: The Business Benefits of Achieving Greater Cloud Adoption”. Only one per cent of organizations claimed to have optimized cloud strategies in place and 32 per cent admitted they have no cloud strategy at all.

Cisco’s customers would be more interested in the second wave of cloud if it resolved their concerns about security, performance, price, control and data protection, according to its vice president for global cloud and managed services sales, Nick Earle. Cisco’s customer sentiments seem to be reflected in the IDC study, according to Earle, and the interest in private and hybrid clouds would seem to confirm this, with 64 per cent of cloud adopters reportedly considering hybrid cloud.

“Our strategy to build private and hybrid infrastructure is reflected in the new IDC study,” said Earle.

The study identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed and optimized. As the cloud strategy of organizations matures, moving from the lowest level ad hoc clouds to fully developed optimized clouds, ‘dramatic’ business benefits materialise, Cisco contends. It quantifies these benefits as revenue growth of 10.4 per cent, IT cost cutting at 77 per cent, a 99 per cent reduction in the time to lay on IT services and applications, a 72 per cent improvement in meeting service level agreements and a doubling of the IT department’s capacity to invest in new projects.

On a macro economic level the study estimated that ‘mature’ cloud organizations gain an average of $1.6 million in additional revenue for every application run on private or public cloud. They also cut the cost per application by $1.2 million by running them in the cloud.

Cisco said that private cloud will improve resource use, allow projects to run at greater scale and will give faster response times, while providing more control and security.

Though concerns about the complexities of hybrid cloud adoption – workload portability, security, and policy enablement – were reflected study, up to 70 per cent of respondents expect to migrate data between public and private clouds or among multiple cloud providers.