Picture credit: CenturyLink

Feature CenturyLink is a cloud provider on a mission. With nearly fifty years’ experience in the traditional telecommunications space, it’s looking to challenge the main storage and infrastructure players.

The Louisiana-based firm is going about it in all the right ways. The company launched CenturyLink Private Cloud back in August, offering the “frictionless hybrid” of private cloud instances plugged into public cloud nodes, and is beginning to make its mark in Europe, opening up a data centre in Frankfurt alongside the five it currently has in London.

Jared Wray, CenturyLink Cloud’s chief technical officer, is in the UK to kick-start proceedings. How has the expansion to Europe been going? “So far it’s been well received,” he tells CloudTech. “A lot of our customers are looking to move to cloud – they’ve already done colocation, they’ve already done managed services.

“When we look at the growth engine we have, we’ve done the United States, we’re now taking a foothold in the UK and our biggest approach right now is to grow our cloud platform,” he adds.

CenturyLink isn’t the only cloud provider to realise the benefits of European data centres to EU-based customers. Wray argues how CenturyLink’s cloud is good enough for the job. “Data sovereignty is a huge topic, especially in the UK [and] Germany, and we’ve built our platform specifically to handle data sovereignty extremely well,” he explains. “We can actually replicate your data on the inside of a specific zone.

“That’s a big critical thing for our customers,” he continues. “Being able to do that and understand the policies in regulations, just like we understand in Canada what they want, we want to be able to do that, and so we built the technology to understand [that].”

The firm’s growth in recent years has been impressive, and fuels the expansion to Europe. Revenue increase in ten years from one billion to 18 billion, and more than 55 data centres globally.

More importantly though, there’s a major opportunity afoot for telecoms operators.

Take a large, built-in customer base, add a sprawling network, and a sprinkling of technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), and the telcos have a great chance to achieve buy-in through cloud solutions, implementing new services, reducing costs and improving the customer experience – generally not operators’ strongest suit.

In September Ericsson bought a majority stake in platform as a service provider Apcera. Verizon has made its intentions perfectly clear with Verizon Cloud. Nokia calls itself a ‘forerunner in developing telco cloud’. Not to be outdone, CenturyLink has a plan. Wray came to CenturyLink through acquisition, as founder of cloud firm Tier 3, and he notes how the senior execs had a plan for ‘cloud-like services’ even before he came on board.

“They said – we don’t want to be just a standard telco, we don’t want to say this is an additional service,” he explains. “When they acquired us they went to the point of actually saying ‘we’re going to build a single platform’. So what you’re going to see from CenturyLink is something completely different than what you see from most telcos, actually going to take the network we have that’s extremely robust and converge it with our computing layers.”

Any service CenturyLink rolls out going forward is going to have three tenets: fully automated; fully programmable; and self service. Wray wryly notes these aren’t telcos’ major strengths either.

“Many telecommunications providers, they’re used to ‘give us an order, we’ll take 90 days, and sometimes we’ll get it right,’” he says. “In our world it’s completely different. We want to make it so you can get up and running, do it all yourself and decide what level of engagement you want us to be on.”

All (internal) change please, all change

So far, so good. Yet if there’s one more thing telcos are notorious for, it’s agility – or lack of it. Most telcos are lumbering behemoths where the simplest memo takes days to sign off, never mind organising business change. Wray notes CenturyLink was a relatively smooth-moving organisation in telecoms land, but he wanted more.

Enter CenturyLink Cloud Development Centre. Opened last month in Seattle, it brings DevOps to the firm’s working environment for cloud platform and innovation. The new ‘offices’ include team rooms organised by function, desks suited to pairing, and built-in collaboration spaces.

“The average developer inside Seattle has four meetings a day, because they’re working for big corporations,” Wray explains. “At CenturyLink Cloud, they have less than one. Most of the time they have a team standup, and that’s it.”

Wray describes the ‘one-to-many communication rule’; wherever possible, avoid one to one discussion as it’s inherently inclusive – this also means, within reason, no phones, which is almost jaw dropping for a telco – and remove meetings. “We used to ban the words ‘good meeting’,” he says. “That was a good meeting. Well what did you get out of it? No, it was a good meeting. They kind of felt like, to run the company, they had to have meetings.”

More organisational change is being ploughed ahead too, collapsing teams and ensuring operations and developers aren’t siloed. In a way, it relates back to the image of a telco becoming more agile through cloud. Telcos can – and have – told customers that cloud is just another payment option, not a concept on which a bunch of stuff hangs. With improved product iteration and a belief in a minimum viable approach, it works both ways.

“I like to say we got rid of trying to have the crystal ball, which a lot of product managers try and do,” Wray says. “It’s almost asinine, if you think about it. They say ‘in three years, this is what our product’s going to look like’. How do you know that the market really wants that?”

The truth is you don’t. But CenturyLink is trying to make things easier for both itself and its customers as the tangled transition to cloud computing takes pace.

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The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published a new document assessing best practice for migrating applications to the cloud, including data transfer requirements and application performance management (APM).

The latest 16 page release is a supplementary document to the 28 page behemoth (pdf) released in December 2013 outlining a migration roadmap for businesses in six easy steps; assess applications and workloads; build a business case; develop a technical approach; adopt a flexible integration model; address security and privacy requirements; and manage the migration.

This paper, however, is more concerned with assessing performance and response time requirements, and offers up some interesting pitfalls for would-be adopters.  “Generally speaking, some applications and workloads are more suitable for cloud computing than others,” the researchers note.

The report assesses a series of data transfer requirements for each workload, be they high, moderate or low latency, yet questions the usage of data discovery tools or questionnaires in assessing each workload – “they do not assess the business requirements and end-to-end transaction flow.”

As a result, the researchers come up with a new three step routine to migrate existing applications to cloud computing:

• Identify business transactions and document their end-to-end application data flow: Understanding specific business transactions, in terms of their throughput and data usage, is much better than questionnaires and discovery tools, the researchers argue. The report cites an eCommerce application which may have both ‘Add to cart’ and ‘Go to checkout’ options. To assess whether it’s right to move to cloud, each facet has to be examined, from preparing the warehouse, to analysing customer behaviour.
• Perform a response time impact risk assessment: There are several factors at play here, according to the researchers: each transaction needs to be assessed based on sensitivity to delay and business importance. Transactions which score highly on both are worthy of being response time tested – again, this goes far deeper than the average questionnaire or discovery tool.
• Perform response time impact testing: Once it’s possible to assess each application’s response on a timed basis, the researchers split the services into two; tier 1 services which become remote, on a wide area network (WAN), from the end users when they were local area before; and application to application or shared services, which become separated across a WAN.

The report also gives advice on application management, with several ways developers can use APM. The researchers recommend end-user experience monitoring, deep dive performance monitoring, analysis of multi-step transactions and transaction based troubleshooting, among others.

You can read the full report here.

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Yes, it’s that time of year again. Everyone who’s got an opinion will be telling the world and his dog about their predictions for cloud computing in 2015. CloudTech will bring you the very best of these in due course, but for now analyst house Forrester has got theirs in early and proclaimed 2015 is the year when companies fighting the cloud will finally be a thing of the past.

The report, entitled “Predictions 2015: The Days of Fighting the Cloud Are Over”, examines 10 key trends for the coming year, offering two up for its non paying customers.

Microsoft’s cloudy revenues go up and up

The first point concerns big vendors and cloud revenues. In 2015, Forrester predicts Microsoft will make more profit from cloud than on-premise software.

It’s been the goal of many historically large IT vendors, from IBM, to SAP, and Oracle. These companies have taken on this mission with varying degrees of success. Yet Forrester seems to be cast under the spell of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s cloud-first, mobile-first vision.

“Under Nadella’s new mandates, its development teams are focused on driving innovation into the cloud versions of its properties first, and its sales engines are all rewarded for pushing as much cloud into each enterprise license agreement as possible,” Dave Bartoletti, infrastructure and operations analyst at Forrester, wrote in a blog. “Consequently, Microsoft itself is embracing continuous delivery development methods.”

The company’s most recent financial results shed a little light on this prediction. Commercial cloud revenue grew 128% in the quarter, while server products and services revenue increased 13%. Comparatively, SAP saw cloud subscriptions at €738 million (£584.1m), a jump of 51% year over year, with software revenues at €2.53bn, a downturn of 3% from this time last year.

If SAP’s figures are going in the right direction strategically, nevertheless it’s a very long game, and therefore a bold prediction.

A change is as good as a REST

Forrester also predicts 2015 to be the year when back end systems will use REST to communicate with one another. REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications, and is increasingly being used to drive agile development, ahead of other protocols such as SOAP.

“If you want your back-office applications to be part of this move forward, relying on traditional integration methods such as enterprise service buses, JDBC connections and SOAP is inadequate for modern applications,” the report notes. “You’ll have to evolve your integration architecture to REST in 2015.”

Other trends, according to ZDNet, include the prevalence of Docker, an open source platform to ship and run apps from anywhere. Given Amazon is the latest company to buddy up with the software, after Google and Microsoft, this may be one of the safer bets. Similarly, Forrester also predicts the death spiral of the private managed cloud.

“In 2014, cloud entered the formal IT portfolio, and technology managers stopped treating cloud as competition,” Bartoletti wrote. “In 2015, cloud technologies will mature into the driving force powering the most successful companies.”

You can find the full report here (subscription required).

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The cloud computing track at Apps World Europe yesterday threw up a series of interesting case studies, opinions and analysis.

John Finch, CIO of the Bank of England, spoke in the keynote session and revealed the bank’s use of cloud technologies only extended to the public-facing front end; John Pillar, CTO of Discover & Deliver spoke of a huge cloud-based IT project at former employer Marks & Spencer, and a morning panel session examined SLAs and mobile cloud best practice.

Matthew Finnie, CTO of virtual data centre provider Interoute, spoke in the panel session. Debates around SLAs and compliance came up because of what Finch, the previous speaker, had discussed – yet Finnie admitted if he were CIO of the country’s central bank, he’d be reticent to take any chances at all.

“Their risk profile is so extreme,” he tells CloudTech. “There’s just downsides, there’s no real upsides. Who are you competing against? There’s no market dynamic.”

There were a couple of best practice tips which emerged from the sessions. The questions one asks on data and compliance are the same from five years ago, so there’s no excuse for missing it off. Where’s the exact address of my data going to be? Who’s going to be able to access it?

Above all though, Finnie noted, bringing up the age old SLA debate – which the Interoute CTO observed is far more to do with statistics than technology – highlights an issue of firms expecting as good as or better performance if they move to the cloud from a static data centre.

“We’ve seen it,” he notes. “Customers move out of a single data centre and then into the cloud and say [they] want to get the same availability…and oftentimes they do.”

“The question then becomes – why don’t you try and maximise? You’ve got multiple options. When you move into a distributed computing model, you’ve got a lot more options in terms of how you can architect it, if the application lets you, as opposed to the traditional data centre where your options are fewer and possibly more expensive.

“Even though they say [they’re] moving onto cloud, they’re mentally thinking about a silo type model,” he adds.

In the afternoon session, Discover & Deliver CTO Pillar examined a Christmas campaign Marks & Spencer had run last year to name the dog which had starred in its big advert. The retailer’s IT department, with the surge of social media voting, was expected to cater for upwards of 97% of the UK population in five minutes. The firm had to enlist help from Microsoft to hammer the site enough to test those figures.

As it was entirely cloud-based, however, it wasn’t as much of a problem for the infrastructure folks. There was a “small bottleneck”, but it was quickly fixed. “As all the environments are treated as cloud, and the software was built in a decoupled way, it just scaled out,” Pillar noted.

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More than four in five (82%) of UK IT leaders believe they are not fully ready to move to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers because of a shortage of in-house skills, with Microsoft Azure as the most trusted IaaS provider.

The research, commissioned by Reconnix, found that despite the general air of reticence moving apps from traditional servers to the cloud was at least a high or medium priority for 88% of those polled.

Yet there’s a problem – and it’s the dreaded skills gap again. Only 7% of respondents were confident they had all the required skills in their team to run IaaS environments. Overall more than half (59%) said they had only some of the required skills, no skills at all, or did not know.

As for the vendors themselves, Microsoft Azure was considered the most trusted IaaS provider. 36% of respondents chose it ahead of IBM (22%) and Amazon Web Services (14%). Steve Nice, the CTO of Reconnix, described this facet as “surprising” by virtue of Amazon’s market share – yet recent market research shows Microsoft is winning the race for second place in IaaS and closing Amazon’s share.

“There’s a very clear desire for businesses to move applications away from traditional environments and towards infrastructure as a service providers, however a lack of adequate skills seem to be holding back many IT departments from making this move,” Nice said.

“It’s natural for businesses to err on the side of caution, but this conservative approach can mean that many are missing out on the transformative benefits of the cloud.”

Respondents claimed cost savings were the single biggest motivator of moving to the cloud with 32% of the vote, with greater flexibility (30%) and increased compute power (18%) also popular.

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IBM has today announced the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for Cloud Startups, which aims to help aspiring firms to the tune of $120,000 (£75,000) if they get a foot up on IBM’s cloud platform.

Those who get the funding will be able to access the entire set of jewels in IBM’s cloudy crown, including SoftLayer infrastructure, Aspera’s data transfer, Cloudant’s database as a service, and Twitter’s social analytics, after the firms’ partnership was announced earlier this month.

Big Blue is also offering face to face events, as well as CIO and entrepreneur meet-ups for successful startups.  With over four million developers and 143,000 companies in the IBM cloud ecosystem, IBM claims it has the widest range of cloud services out there.

The firm certainly feels as though it’s got the largest in terms of funding, trilling in its press literature the $120k is greater than Google ($100k), Microsoft Azure ($60k) and Amazon Web Services’ ($15k) offerings. This publication is reminded of Rackspace’s £250,000 pledge to startups back in November 2013, but that was the total amount of its cloud hosting, so IBM does have the edge, providing it gets more than three customers, anyway.

For the enterprise market in particular, the fresh blood startups provide can be a boon for larger companies looking for more streamlined solutions to age-old IT problems. Again, IBM facilitates this by offering connections with its in-depth enterprise customer base.

“The IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for Cloud Startups provides a comprehensive and strong network of resources to drive collaborative cloud innovation,” said Norwest Ventures’ Promod Haque. “By enabling access to IBM’s broad and fast-growing enterprise cloud portfolio and third party cloud services build around open APIs, startups can now more easily build and monetise their solutions.

“More importantly, by providing a global path to the enterprise, this program can help accelerate the rate at which cloud startups can get to market and scale,” he added.

It’s interesting to note how a venture capitalist is championing this kind of innovation. It’s clear the large vendors want to muscle into this space, however there may be room for both kinds of approach. Current cloudy startups receiving venture capital include software-defined storage firm SwiftStack with $16m, cloud-based platform Volometrix – $12m in series B – and OpenStack provider Mirantis, with a whopping $100m.

You can find out more here.

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German tech giant SAP has announced former Microsoft corporate vice president (CVP) Quentin Clark as its new chief technology officer.

Clark was previously at Microsoft, where he’d served for 20 years, as CVP for business applications, reporting directly to then executive vice president Satya Nadella. He helped oversee the delivery of various data products including Microsoft SQL Server, Power BI, and BI in Microsoft Office.

His job role at SAP is described on his LinkedIn profile as ‘technology ambassador.’ “Clark will drive direction and vision of SAP’s future technology and shape SAP’s brand as the technology leader”, it adds.

“I am very pleased to have Quentin join SAP,” said executive board member Bernd Leukert, who Clark will report to. “He is not only an impressive technologist who thrives on pursuing a meaningful vision but at the same time a passionate leader.”

He added: “I am sure that Quentin will significantly contribute to shaping and executing our technology strategy and turning opportunities into innovation – and help our customers to Run Simple.”

In other words, this is cloud, cloud, cloud. The company released its third quarter results last month and found cloud subscriptions up 51% from Q313, while software revenues were down 3% from this time last year.

The problem with that, however, is cloud subscriptions and support was €738m (£584.1m), while software revenue was €2.53bn (£1.99bn). It’s a bit of a jump, but then it’s what SAP would roughly be expecting given it wants to migrate its revenues to cloud. For a company with ambitions to be ‘THE cloud company’, then it’s little surprise analysts have been concerned about its future, along with the likes of Oracle and IBM.

The move to bring Clark in as CTO continues the list of the executive merry-go-round. Former SAP head of cloud Shawn Price recently joined Oracle, as well as former Google App Engine exec Peter Magnusson.

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Over the next 12 months, the majority of business applications will be deployed to the cloud, with most of these being deployed to multiple clouds across multiple geographies.

That’s the key trend from a survey conducted by Equinix, in which the overwhelming majority of the 659 global respondents (77%) said they planned to deploy to multiple clouds in the next year, and a similar number (74%) expect a larger budget in 2015 for cloud services.

91% of new cloud-based offerings will be deployed in the organisation over the coming 12 months, while 45% of new cloud-based apps will be deployed at a third party colocation provider.

It’s clear that multiple cloud deployments are the way forward, but the report also made mention of how this was going to take place: interconnected data centres. 87% of respondents indicates that interconnection is required to meet cloud performance objectives, while 85% argue that direct connections to cloud providers are “highly valued.”

The report found that globally, 11% of firms are planning to deploy more than 10 cloud services in the next 12 months, compared with only 6% for North America. It’s an interesting trend, and shows how cloud deployments are catching up outside the US. 38% of firms globally are going to deploy between three and five services, compared to 30% for North America.

Globally, 7% said they were expecting to deploy to multiple clouds over the next three months; this again compares favourably with just 1% for North America. Only a minimal number (15% globally, 17% North America) said the process will take more than 12 months. Three quarters (74%) of global respondents say they will be deploying in multiple countries in some capacity.

“What surprised us about this survey is how quickly multi-cloud strategies are becoming the norm worldwide,” commented Ihab Tarazi, Equinix CTO. “Businesses have discovered that colocation provides a meaningful ROI for WAN optimisation, and it is clear that multi cloud deployment will improve the ROI even more.”

The report comprised IT decision makers, including IT executives (44%), IT managers (54%) and IT service providers (2%).

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Cloud services provider Interoute has announced it will open up a new virtual data centre (VDC) zone in Frankfurt on December 1.

The new VDC zone is the seventh to be launched in 2014, the 14^th overall, and the second in Germany, alongside the zone in Berlin launched in 2012. The firm launched data centres in Milan, Hong Kong, New York, London, Slough and Madrid this year.

It’s another step towards protecting data of European customers within EU borders, and offers ultra low, in-country latency and a resilient platform connected via fibre. It also plays into the trend of managed services; customers can spin up or down dependent on their needs with a hands on IT infrastructure or a fully managed service.

The company is also committed to startups, with the first year of access free via the JumpStart-up program.

“Expanding the application universe that can be moved to the cloud is central to Interoute’s approach,” said Matthew Finnie, Interoute CTO. “Critical from a German perspective is data control and location.”

The data centres are closely linked to Interoute’s CloudStore, a one stop shop for enterprises to deploy applications on the firm’s VDC. Speaking to CloudTech at the launch of the Hong Kong VDC, CloudStore general manager Lee Myall noted how it enabled smaller customers to buy IT on a ‘help themselves’ basis.

With concerns over the state of US data, many cloud providers are expanding their operations to Europe. Salesforce announced the opening of its first European data centre in London last month, with France and Germany in its sights, while Amazon Web Services launched a Frankfurt data centre region last month to great fanfare.

Alongside the virtual data centres, Interoute’s portfolio also comprises 12 data centres, 31 colocation centres, and over 67,000km of lit fibre.

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Updated “All Sage lines terminate here.” This is the opening statement of an advert placed in yesterday’s Financial Times and Metro by NetSuite.

Parodying a railway network, the ad asks: “Has your business come to the end of the line with Sage?” adding it had poached 500 customers from its rival.

CEO Zach Nelson has approved the campaign, seeing it as an ideal time to further European expansion for NetSuite. Nelson is planning to move to the UK for a period next year to help with this, as well as oversee the recent acquisition of the UK-based commerce provider Venda back in July.

When the two companies spoke to CloudTech as the deal was being completed, they agreed they both “shared the same DNA”, with Pete Daffern, EMEA president at NetSuite, arguing: “It’s just us doubling down on our European investment.”

Sage’s SMB segment managing director Steve Attwell said in response to the advert: “In Sage’s world, businesses don’t run in a straight line and end. They adapt, evolve and grow.”

He added: “If Sage ran the underground, it wouldn’t be under the ground, it would not have an end of line and there would be no gaps to mind. You would get to your destination quicker, there would be no delays and you would get there with confidence.”

NetSuite is planning to announce a variety of new customers and launches at its SuiteConnect conference in London on November 10. Nelson will be delivering a keynote speech: “The Next Disruption: Collision of Product and Services Business”.

Despite its ambition, there’s still lots of work for NetSuite to do if it wants to topple Sage. The Newcastle-based firm recorded revenues of £657m for the first half of this year, compared to NetSuite’s £160m.

This feud looks like it will run and run. Take a look at the advert below – what do you think?