Cloud software giant Salesforce has announced a new $50 million (£38.8m) fund from Salesforce Ventures, the company’s corporate investment arm, to provide growth for the ‘next generation’ of cloud consulting organisations.

The SI [system integrator] Trailblazer Fund will “provide the next generation of cloud consulting companies with the capital required to build and scale their Salesforce services capabilities for the future – and empower customers to transform their businesses with Salesforce,” as the press materials put it.

Naturally, it’s not an especially altruistic venture, although among the companies Salesforce is already helping in this regard are 7Summits, an online community consulting partner for the Salesforce Community Cloud, and Arxxus, a provider of Salesforce professional services in Australia.

Another company getting involved is ATG, a company which provides quote to cash (CPQ) advisory and implementation services. This is a particularly interesting area on which this publication has recently focused; in a piece last month, contributor Louis Columbus noted how CPQ “continues to be one of the hottest enterprise apps today, fuelled by the relentless need all companies have to increase sales while delivering customised orders profitably and accurately.”

Alongside the money, Salesforce is also launching the SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative, giving companies in the portfolio a wide range of training and tools, including accelerated onboarding and marketing and sales mentorship from company experts.

The company cites an IDC note which argues that Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will drive more than $389 billion in new GDP impact and 1.9 million new jobs worldwide by 2020. It’s therefore not the ‘software economy’ so much as the ‘Salesforce economy’.

“Consulting firms play a pivotal role in the Salesforce ecosystem, implementing Salesforce solutions that meet the needs of customers of all sizes, industries and geographies,” said John Somorjai, EVP of corporate development and Salesforce Ventures in a statement. “This new fund will foster the next generation of SIs and supercharge the growth of the Salesforce ecosystem.”

Cloud native architectures will become the ‘default’ option for customer-facing applications by 2020, according to a new study from Capgemini.

The research, which surveyed more than 900 senior professionals across 11 countries, found that 15% of new enterprise applications are cloud native today, set to jump to 32% by 2020.

The study also outlined the different stages organisations are currently at in deployments. ‘Leader’ organisations, those which are already committed to cloud-native applications, are twice as likely to report increases in organisational revenues as a result of this strategy compared with laggards. Cloud native leaders are also more likely to describe their software development approach as agile – 69% of respondents compared with 37% of laggards – as well as be more likely to focus on customer growth than cut costs for IT.

This has an effect on the CIO, the study notes. While the rise in cloud native apps prompts many CIOs to see IT as even more central to supporting business growth, challenges remain. Two thirds (65%) of respondents said they expect to ‘battle an ingrained culture’ opposed to cloud native working, with an additional 70% fearing a skills shortage. 62% cited integration with legacy infrastructure as an issue.

Yet Capgemini says avoiding the issue will only make things worse. “Businesses that delay adopting this approach will struggle to make up the gap with cloud-native competitors,” said Franck Greverie, cloud and cybersecurity group leader at Capgemini in a statement. “Organisations need to listen to their CIOs and understand the huge potential of cloud-native technology to deliver business benefits and innovation.

“CIOs must also address culture and skills gaps within their own organisations on the road to being cloud-native leaders,” Greverie added.

Capgemini gave a six-point roadmap for organisations looking to build a cloud native business:

• Assess the application portfolio and identify priorities for cloud native development
• Build credibility by demonstrating a cloud roadmap and ability to deliver growth
• Start small, and then scale up to develop a skilled team
• Adapt the IT operating model to support both business agility and stability
• Be pragmatic in selecting technologies
• Incubate a culture of innovation, collaboration, testing and learning

You can find out more by reading the report here (registration required).

A new piece of research from cloud security provider Zscaler looks at the issues with deploying Office 365 in large organisations – and found that companies still suffered from latency despite upgrading their firewalls.

The study, which polled more than 200 respondents from organisations with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, found more than two thirds of respondents had beefed up their firewalls in preparation for Office 365 – a typical tactic for deployments – yet 69% reported post-deployment latency.

Almost two thirds (64%) of respondents in the survey admitted they had concerns over the impact of Office 365 on their bandwidth before deploying, while 69% expected to see a bandwidth increase of more than 50%.

The figures got worse once companies took the plunge. Almost half (48%) of those polled said network infrastructure and equipment upgrade costs for Office 365 exceeded their estimates. This is despite 28% of respondents believing the total cost of IT, security and network infrastructure needed to deploy Office 365 was at least 75% of their typical budget.

Yet increasing the bandwidth did not result in a faster Office 365 experience, the research found. 30% of respondents reported daily issues, with 69% reporting weekly problems, impacting on business operations and productivity.

As a result, organisations are ‘beginning to realise that legacy applications were not designed to handle the network demands of Office 365’, as the report puts it. 

“Through their own experiences, organisations are finding out that they simply cannot run ac loud application of the magnitude of Office 365 on legacy architecture,” said Punit Minocha, VP business development at Zscaler. “To fully leverage the power of Office 365, a majority of organisations are looking to transform their networks from traditional hub-and-spoke implementations to ones that securely access the Internet directly from branch offices.”

As Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, noted at the company’s BUILD conference earlier this month, Office 365 now tops more than 100 million monthly active users (MAUs). Zscaler also said that Office 365 was the fastest growing software as a service (SaaS) application on its cloud.

You can read the full report here (no registration required).

Is it the line of business or IT leading cloud initiatives? According to the latest paper from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), IT directors believe that cloud adoption is driven principally by their IT function as part of a strategic shift, rather than the need for change driven by business decision makers.

The study, which polled 250 IT and business decision makers in large enterprises, found that overall cloud adoption now stands at 88%, with more than two thirds (67%) of users expecting to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year.

According to the research, IT decision makers are more likely to think the head of IT or CIO is driving migration to the cloud, while business development managers (BDM) are more likely to say it is driven by the CEO.

CIF dug further into the trends and found a variety of differences between business and IT. IT is more likely to report faster access to technology as a key benefit, compared with BDM more likely to report cost savings, while IT is more likely to note that replacing legacy tech is driving investment opportunities within their cloud initiatives. IT is also more pessimistic about their organisation’s digital strategy – only 18% of those surveyed said it was ‘completely clear’, compared with 33% on the business development side.

“Aligning IT with business strategy is nothing new,” said Alex Hilton, Cloud Industry Forum CEO. “Organisations, which have struggled to use IT to achieve business objectives, are often due to differences in departmental goals and culture, or a mutual ignorance of each other’s methods, resulting in ineffectual products and systems, which fail to provide an effective return on investment.

“These findings are critical therefore to our understanding of the institutional and organisational challenges confronted by many in both the IT department and the wider business,” Hilton added. “Perceptions and expectations are widely different and those enterprises looking to deliver digital transformation projects effectively need to address this disconnect head on.”

To say it has been a busy week at Rackspace would be something of an understatement. The company has announced the appointment of Joe Eazor as its new chief executive while also unveiling the acquisition of enterprise app management provider TriCore Solutions.

Eazor joins Rackspace having previously headed up EarthLink. The company had specialised in dial-up internet but moved into the 21st century with the addition of a cloud and networking portfolio, a shift with which Eazor is credited, culminating in a billion dollar merger with Windstream announced in November last year.

The company’s missive indicated no strategic shift this time around, however, with Eazor saying he was ‘excited by the huge market opportunity that Rackspace has’ in managed services.

“Rackspace is uniquely well positioned to take advantage of this trend, as the only provider who can deliver expertise and exceptional customer service for all of the leading public and private clouds, along with managed hosting,” Eazor said in a statement

“Thanks to the strategy Rackspace adopted a few years ago, it’s got the early lead in the managed cloud space,” he added. “My goal here is to build on that foundation and make us the world’s preeminent IT services company.”

This was expanded upon in a blog post titled ‘Why I’m joining Rackspace’ – the valedictory post from outgoing CEO Taylor Rhodes at the beginning of this month was naturally titled ‘Why I’m leaving Rackspace’ – where Eazor discussed the importance of leaving the public arena. “As a private company, we can move more aggressively and rapidly to allocate resources for long-term growth, to enhance our product offerings, to expand into new geographies and make smart acquisitions,” he wrote.

Lo and behold, news on the latter duly arrived with intention to buy TriCore Solutions. The company serves approximately 275 managed service customers and aims to ‘deliver services on infrastructure in any location the customer chooses’. This all rings nicely with Rackspace’s ambition, announcing a partnership with Google to become its first managed cloud services support partner in March, as well as noting ‘strong demand’ for AWS cloud customers, as well as Microsoft and OpenStack private cloud in its Q216 results last August.

The transaction is expected to close in June with financial details not disclosed, while Eazor starts his new role on June 12.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

May 25 2018 will see the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation come into effect.

Organisations will by now be more than aware of the penalties – 4% of annual turnover or €20 million (£17.3m), whichever is greater, and if not take this as your final warning – but how are companies reacting to it?

Keyrus is a data intelligence and master data management (MDM) provider. The company has been putting its message out there at various events – including at the Information Builders Summit in London this week, with another at IBM at the end of the month – on how organisations need to protect themselves and what they can do about it.

Santiago Castro is head of business analytics at Keyrus’ UK practice. He explains that while each company is different in its requirements, there are other issues at play.

“You would like to have a one size fits all type solution, but one of the main points of GDPR is to understand what the purpose is of holding data and processing data,” he says. “It also depends on what your contractual situation is with your customers; some customers agree or allow organisations to hold data for these purposes while others don’t have that agreement.”

Naturally, with the anniversary looming some organisations have put together a few best practice ideas of their own. Skyhigh Networks, for example, issued a new eBook, titled ‘The GDPR: An Action Guide for IT’ earlier this week. The cloud access security broker (CASB) offers companies the chance to assess their GDPR ‘risk’ rating, as well as advanced encryption for structured and unstructured data.

Keyrus puts together a seven-step methodology for customers, to understand first of all what is needed, assess the gaps needed to be filled for compliance, then look at the risks, plan what needs to happen first, and move on from there. It’s ‘awareness to assessment to prioritising to planning to implementation’, as Castro puts it.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, chief privacy officer at NetApp, puts it this way. “Companies of all sizes need to take an active look at what data they hold, what they use it for, and where it’s stored,” she said. “They can then use this insight to conduct a comprehensive review of data privacy policies, consents, processes and so on to ensure they are meeting the minimum legal requirements.” Castro adds that in some cases, consent from customers will suffice.

The key aspect however is to treat GDPR not as a potential disaster looming towards the horizon, but as an opportunity. “I often try to see it more as an opportunity than as a pain or cost,” says Castro, “because if you actually understand data assets, they can get more valuable, so this is an investment to do something with the data you hold.”

This is backed up by Rogelio Aguilar, senior consultant at Sungard Availability Services. “Businesses should approach the next year as a great opportunity to drive increased value,” he said. “A correct GDPR implementation will help businesses manage data privacy risk, implement good record management practices, streamline business processes, increase resilience as well as benefit from cost savings and ultimately a more competitive market position.

“To take advantage of these opportunities and mitigate risk, senior management must champion GDPR as a strategic initiative.”

Read more: Why you need to understand GDPR now – and what you need to do from here

The vast majority of respondents polled by DataCore say they plan to or have already moved to software-defined storage, with simplifying different models of storage the primary business driver.

The study, which polled 426 IT professionals currently using or evaluating various storage models, found that simplifying storage was the primary reason for implementing software-defined storage for 55% of respondents. Future-proofing infrastructure was cited by 53% of those polled, while avoiding hardware lock-in was also cited by more than half (52%) of respondents.

Despite this, almost one third (31%) of those polled said that cloud storage initiatives failed to reduce costs. 29% noted that managing object storage was ‘difficult’, while 16% said utilising Flash failed to accelerate applications.

The report also examined levels of spending on various technologies. Not surprisingly, software-defined storage topped the rankings, with 29% of respondents saying more than a tenth of the company’s overall budget was allocated to it. In what was described by DataCore as a surprising finding, 70% of respondents said investing in OpenStack storage was ‘not applicable’.

Uptake of hyperconverged infrastructure was also lower than expected, the report noted, with 34% of respondents saying they had considered hyperconverged but not deployed it, and an additional 33% saying they were not considering it at all.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Richard Eglon, marketing director at Agilitas, mused on what the rise of hyperconverged means for marketers. “Marketers have always had to adapt to change and embrace technology advancements in order to succeed,” he wrote. “As a result, a new breed of the collaborative hyper-marketer is emerging that will need to accelerate that pace of change in today’s hyperconverged workplace.”

You can take a look at the full report here.

Cloud computing skills are certainly in demand, whether it is microservices, containers, or DevOps. Yet according to a new US study, colleges and universities are struggling to adapt.

A new report from B2B research company Clutch says that despite LinkedIn naming ‘cloud and distributed computing’ as the number one global skill of 2016, spiralling costs of course resources, limited expertise on-campus and the pace of innovation in the industry were contributing factors to the struggle.

“I do not think any university is able to teach this topic because of its lightning fast evolution,” said Dr. Ken Birman, a professor at Cornell University. “As a purely pragmatic matter, we cannot teach the area until it begins to slow down and hold still for at least a few years at a time.”

This certainly makes sense as a cause for concern. Birman added that as new products might individually take a few weeks to learn to use, and then the time added on to develop a lecture, set the examination and so forth, once it is out there it can quickly become obsolete.

Clutch therefore took a look at US establishments which were teaching cloud computing courses to see how they compared. The University of North Florida offers ‘CEN 6086: Cloud Computing’, a graduate study with a heavy research base, which covers the different cloud models from aaS to public, private and hybrid, as well as architectures. According to Dr. Sanjay Ahuja, a full professor of computer science at the university, the course is a “hybrid of research-driven content and work with public clouds, specifically Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine.”

This is all well and good – but it’s worth noting that Amazon Web Services (AWS) released more than 1,000 updates last year. “In terms of resources, a knowledgeable professor, grad student, or assistant is necessary,” said Ahuja. “Someone who is very educated about cloud computing and architecture, including platforms like Hadoop, and automation tools, like Chef and Puppet.”

This side is something which this publication has covered for a while – the latest piece of research on the topic, from Rackspace earlier this week, picked out microservices as the sector to soar in the coming 12 months, while containers and automation continue to perform strongly in job postings. Before then, however, Ahuja recommends that an industry leader with an interest in teaching could step in to fill the gaps.

Another issue is around cost. For students, who are not usually known for being flush with cash, it’s not the course itself which is the issue, but using the likes of AWS, Google, Microsoft et al in the more hands-on elements. This aspect is however being monitored by Dr. Majid Sakr, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon; if a student goes above budget, they get a 10% penalty on their final grade, while if they go more than double above budget they automatically get a 0. “What we’ve heard from our industry partners is that it would be wonderful if the students are going to program this very large cloud, that they can also be thoughtful about the budget,” said Sakr.

So what is the solution? There are plenty of certifications and courses available from the vendors themselves – this publication examined the better ones in April, including ones from AWS, Microsoft and Cisco – but these all have their own cost. Riley Panko, Clutch content developer and marketer and author of the report, noted that this does not solve the problem of the dreaded ‘skills gap’.

“Traditional university and college programs are where a large proportion of the workforce learns their career skills,” she told CloudTech. “Non-traditional options need to be purposefully sought out, which students may not do if they have no exposure to cloud computing.

“By having limited cloud computing course options within traditional higher education programs, students potentially won’t gain these skills, despite being qualified,” Panko added. “This does not help alleviate the skills gap present in cloud computing.”

Kevin McDonald, who teaches a cloud computing course at Georgetown University, noted the importance of computer science students learning about cloud. “It’s becoming more important to understand cloud computing simply because… it’s being adopted quite rapidly now,” he said. “Having in-depth experience and knowledge of the cloud is probably a core competency going forward.”

You can read the full Clutch report here.

Three quarters of organisations say 80% of their apps will be software as a service (SaaS) by 2020, while 38% of companies are already running ‘almost entirely’ on SaaS, according to a new report from BetterCloud.

The report, which polled more than 1,800 IT professionals, also found that larger organisations are not the laggards that many believe. Only a quarter (27%) of medium to large enterprises have the vast majority of their applications as SaaS today, but this number is expected to rise to 69% by 2020 – compared to 75% for SMBs – and 86% after 2022.

“Larger enterprises are slower to act, but once they do, they add legitimacy, turning a fringe trend to a mainstream mainstay,” the report notes. “In regards to SaaS adoption, that tipping point has occurred.”

BetterCloud coins those who have moved almost everything away from on-prem as ‘SaaS-powered workplaces’. These organisations use 34 SaaS apps on average – more than two times the average workplace – while benefits are evident if scattered. An overwhelming 52% said that compared to the average organisation they were more likely to say SaaS helps attract better talent, with 31% citing employee satisfaction, while only 8% and 7% respectively cited communication and cost benefits.

The management side is also worth noting. According to the research, 88% of very small businesses and 74% of small to medium businesses say their SaaS apps are managed by the IT department. This number goes down to 42% when looking at the larger organisations, but the trend is there for the emergence of the SaaS-powered workplace in ‘empowering IT to run the world’s best workplaces through technology’, as the report notes. In contrast, the 2016 report from BetterCloud found that corporate IT departments were drowning in the deluge of SaaS app requests.

“SaaS is a double-edged sword – while it brings incredible benefits, it also creates formidable challenges that are taking the roles and responsibilities of IT to new extremes,” said David Politis, founder and CEO of BetterCloud.

You can download the full report here.

If you want to get ahead, get tooled up on microservices as vacancies for job roles have gone up by 133% over the last year, according to the latest report from Rackspace.

Microservices, which enable applications to become more agile and prevent servers from being jammed, are becoming increasingly prevalent in a world of data overload. Think of the stat, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it at BUILD earlier this month, that 90% of the data in the world today have been created over the last two years, or the fact that 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and you get the idea of its importance.

It’s also forcing change in other areas, Rackspace argues. Job postings for agile software development, a fundamental skill in microservices, went up 16% over the past 12 months, while skills for more traditional service-orientated architecture (SOA) declined by 22%.

Skills with regard to container technologies continued to gain ground in the past year, with demand for engineers versed in Google Kubernetes going up an astonishing 919% since 2016, with Docker continuing to tick over nicely at 83%. The rise in Docker-related job postings had gone up 341% and 991% over the previous two years, so there is something of a slowdown.

“The demand for different technology skills, and consequently, the rise in new job roles are constantly evolving in the IT sector both in the UK and beyond,” said Darren Norfolk, managing director of Rackspace UK. “In 2015, we saw the number of cloud engineering roles grow dramatically, but now we’re seeing a demand for more nuanced, specific skills emerge.

“This will only become more pronounced as businesses expand and look for expertise to help manage different elements of their business,” he added. “Business leaders must be able to plan ahead and make sure they have skills in the right areas in order to benefit both the business going forward, and the employees who work in it.”

CloudTech’s 2017 examination of the key cloud skills needed for success, as provided by Firebrand Training, include database and big data skills, application security, enterprise cloud migration, cloud enterprise application development, as well as containers.

Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2017