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Corporate IT departments are drowning in the deluge of SaaS app requests, according to a report from BetterCloud.

The data, the first in a two part set, reveals how IT departments are “overworked and overwhelmed”, and a simple lack of time is prohibiting further cloud software being integrated into companies. Almost three quarters (73%) of IT pros surveyed feel guilt over this, saying they believe their end users lack SaaS apps that would increase productivity. In contrast, 45% of end users say the same. The number of cloud app deployments has gone up by half over the past year, with IT departments supporting on average 12 apps as of March.

The natural progression of this is that users, frustrated by IT’s lack of time, bring their own applications into the organisation without approval. When asked, only a quarter (26%) said they did ask IT for approval, 44% said no, while 30% said sometimes.

Cloud storage and collaboration appears to be the biggest sticking point as far as IT is concerned, with more than 40% of respondents saying those apps are the most difficult to secure and manage. It is a similar story with users; 29% say their storage and collaboration apps are in the biggest need of an upgrade, while other votes arrived for messaging (18%), project management (17%), human resources (14%) and ticketing (14%).

One of the more curious points of the research – which again shows the disparity between IT and end users for cloud apps – showed that while end users believe they take three months to become ‘proficient’ at SaaS applications, IT believes it should be nearer six months. BetterCloud content marketing manager Scott Solomon explains: “IT professionals should understand just how long it takes before end users consider themselves proficient.

“It’s not a stretch to think that offering continuous training sessions or materials could cut an end user’s time to proficiency in half,” he adds. “If end users feel proficient faster, IT will get fewer support requests and organisations will see an ROI more quickly.”

You can read the report findings here.

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Google’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering Compute Engine lost connectivity across all regions for 18 minutes on April 11 after problems experienced with a bug in its network configuration management software.

In a status update discussing the outage and how it occurred posted yesterday, the search giant confirmed the event affected Compute Engine only, and bemoaned how its ‘canary step’ process – a configuration deployed to a single site to ensure there are no issues with upstream failures – had a software bug. The result was that the push system wrongly believed there were no issues with the new configuration, and therefore happily began its rollout resulting in dropped traffic.

“The Google engineers who had been investigating a localised failure of the asia-east1 VPN now knew that they had a widespread and serious problem,” a post from Benjamin Treynor Sloss, the interestingly titled ‘VP 24×7’ at Google, reads. “They did precisely what we train for, and decided to revert the most recent configuration changes made to the network even before knowing for sure what the problem was.

“This was the correct action, and the time from detection to decision to revert to the end of the outage was thus just 18 minutes,” Sloss adds.

Naturally Google has apologised to its customers, and has also thrown in discounts of service credits up to 25% of impacted Compute Engine and VPN applications for those affected ‘to underscore how seriously we are taking this event.’ Previously, Google’s cloud has fallen over due to a connectivity fault in February last year, and an issue with manual link activation back in November.

Google says that the latest issue is under control meaning there is no risk of a reoccurrence, while its engineering teams will be working on prevention, detection, and mitigation systems over the next ‘several weeks’ to aim to ensure this sort of thing won’t happen again.

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Almost two thirds (65%) of OpenStack deployments are now in production, up 33% from this time last year, according to the latest user survey by the OpenStack Foundation.

The report, the seventh of its kind and featuring responses from more than 1,600 users, finds organisations are moving towards OpenStack as the default open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) API.

Not surprisingly, IT (68%) is where the largest number of OpenStack bods are based, followed by telecoms (14%) and academia (9%), yet interestingly the figures also found OpenStack was used among organisations of all sizes. 17% of the community polled had between 10 and 99 employees, while 16% had a behemoth 100,000 workers or more. Despite this wide range of responses, only half (52%) said they would recommend the open source platform to a friend, in classic Net Promoter Score style. 37% were ‘passive’ and 11% were ‘detractors’, although it is worth noting scores of 80% or higher were considered as a pass.

Among the reasons to recommend OpenStack, according to the report, were good community support – including the speed and agility of which changes are pushed through – and avoiding vendor lock in, while fragmented governance, difficulty in deployment and project complexity were among the detracting features. Peculiarly, both an increase in stability and a lack of stability were cited.

In terms of technologies deployed, the report saw little change, but containerisation continues to ride high. The use of platform as a service (PaaS) and container orchestration in particular saw significant changes, with Kubernetes moving ahead of CloudFoundry to become the top PaaS tool.

Overall however, the prognosis remains good. “Being a flexible framework to build on is the most important aspect of the OpenStack platform,” said one unnamed user. “Also, being able to support both traditional and cloud-native workloads is very important because large enterprises don’t have the luxury of dropping their legacy applications and forklifting them into the microservices-type designs from day one.

“The benefits of the cloud are too great to only allow new workloads onto the platform.”

The figures from the OpenStack Foundation correlate with recent survey data from cloud software provider Talligent, which found OpenStack adoption was going up and being increasingly seen as a cost effective alternative to public clouds.

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CIOs continue to mop their brow over whether their IT infrastructure is good enough to meet their organisation’s long term requirements whilst worrying about where they fit in, according to a new piece of research released by EMC.

The survey, of more than 2700 business and IT professionals in EMEA, examined the CIO’s perspective of what is to be expected in five years’ time, and found that three quarters believe they need to launch new products and services in half the time it takes today. Extracting value from increasing volumes of data is the top IT challenge for organisations, according to 41% of respondents, while accommodating rapid scaling was seen as the next greatest challenge.

In many organisations, the research argues, CIOs are at risk of isolation, managing increasing expectations from IT and finding little common ground with the rest of the C-suite. With increased expectation comes paranoia over whether their business is good enough for the job. More than two in three (69%) of those polled said business growth could reveal weaknesses in traditional IT operations leading IT to hang back as opposed to embracing innovation.

Four in five (80%) of respondents argue implementing a more agile IT infrastructure would reduce risk, while almost half of those polled say they are training IT professionals in the likes of cloud computing and converged infrastructure. The trends are more indicative in smaller businesses; employees with more than 1000 employees tend to have fewer of these issues and are more likely to have invested in training.

“The research casts new light on current attitudes towards IT within businesses of all sizes,” said Nigel Moulton, VCE EMEA chief technical officer. “To reclaim full control, CIOs and their IT teams need to stop spending so much time building and managing different infrastructure components.

“Instead they need to transform IT into an efficient business-focused engine that can scale rapidly in response to changing business needs,” he added.

According to a recent analysis from IDC, EMC and parent company Dell have a combined 19.9% share of the global cloud infrastructure market, ahead of the market leader, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

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The global cloud infrastructure market has grown 22% year on year to hit a $29 billion (£20.4bn) value in 2015 with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at the top of the tree, according to the latest research note from IDC.

The findings, which appear in the analyst house’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker report, sees HPE atop the list of infrastructure vendors, with fourth quarter revenues of $1.3bn (£915m) representing a 15.8% overall market share. Dell (10.2%), Cisco (9.7%) – jointly given the silver medal by IDC because of how close their propositions are – EMC (9.2%) and IBM (4.3%) comprise the top five.

All leading firms saw their revenues increase year over year, and all apart from IBM saw that growth in double digits. Cisco (35.5% revenue growth) saw greatest expansion, ahead of Dell (26.7%), EMC (19.7%) and HPE (17.2%). Quarterly revenues for 4Q15 were at $8.2bn, up 15% from 4Q14’s $7.1bn.

In terms of specific regions, cloud infrastructure vendors saw greatest success in Japan, with sales rising 50% year over year in 4Q15. Asia Pacific – excluding Japan – was similarly popular (38.7%), followed by Western Europe (30.5%), Canada (23.5%) and the United States, with its mature and saturated market, trailing although showing 6.6% revenue growth.

“The cloud IT infrastructure market continues to see strong double digit growth with faster gains coming from public cloud infrastructure demand,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing platforms, adding: “While the ice was broken a long time ago for public cloud services, the continued evolution of the enterprise IT customer means that public cloud acceptance and adoption will continue on a steady pace into the next decade.”

Critical assessment of the changes in the market has been cautiously positive. HP’s decision, first announced in 2014 and finalised a year later, to split its business into two, one for enterprise and one for printing and personal, means HPE’s shares have of late gained “solid momentum”, according to financial research house Zacks.

Regarding the acquisition of EMC by Dell for an eye-watering $67bn in October, including VCE and VMware among others, many were happy to stick the boot in, with one writer describing such companies as “the walking dead”. Dell has shuffled the pack for its hyperconverged infrastructure products, but it is the combination of Dell and EMC’s market share (19.9%) which could be a game changer. The IDC forecast correlates similarly with Synergy Research figures on the cloud infrastructure equipment market; back in September the analyst firm announced HP had finally overtaken Cisco due to its investment in the server and storage space.

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2016 may well be the year where the software defined data centre (SDDC) will become a fixture in the US, according to a study released by Intel and HyTrust.

According to the report, which polled the views of more than 500 senior business executives, 65% of respondents – and 66% from the C-suite – expect increased adoption in this area, while 62% of CxO respondents argue there will be faster deployment in 2016, while roughly half expect greater tangible benefits (49%) and more adoption for network virtualisation (48%) respectively.

41% of those polled expect better alignment of security strategies specifically to address the SDDC, while half (50%) see greater use of public cloud and 38% see workloads traversing hybrid clouds and utilising hyper-converged infrastructure respectively.

Yet the outlook is not entirely sunny. 56% of those polled said a data centre outage would either be ‘likely’ or ‘most likely’ with the move to SDDC, while more than two thirds (67%) argue a data breach would be the highest concern. Loss of operational efficiencies (59%), lack of automation and orchestration (58%) and compliance or audit failure (58%) were also seen as likely issues.

Almost three quarters (74%) of the C-suite polled said they expect to see security as less of an obstacle to greater SDDC adoption, but despite this many of those polled do not have any illusions about the dangers of security. The position of the market right now is key and the survey reveals an interesting insight in this regard; 44% of those polled decry the lack of solutions from current vendors and the immaturity of vendor offerings. It is a view echoed by this publication; Michael Allen, CTO and EMEA VP of Dynatrace, told CloudTech that software defined networking (SDN) and the SDDC were at a similar level to where cloud computing was two years ago.

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IBM and SAP have announced their latest strategic partnership, building on a deal struck in 2014 between Big Blue and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

Described at the time as “SAP’s biggest news sitting on one of IBM’s biggest investments”, the latest announcement offers cloud-based solutions, with IBM and SAP collaborating on industry-specific cloud operations, as well as on-premise capabilities and improvements to the customer and user experience. The proposals include an expansion of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud services for ongoing application maintenance and support, as well as scaling of the IBM cloud platform.

The two companies will also set up shop together in Germany and California, as well as showcase the fruits of their labour in global innovation centres.

“The future of business strategy and business value will proceed from the foundational elements of this announcement – cognitive, cloud and the design of consumer-quality experiences in every industry,” said Bridget van Kralingen, SVP IBM global business services in a statement. “We’re formalising a complementary set of capabilities to simplify and speed outcomes for clients evolving to become cognitive enterprises.” Rob Enslin, SAP president of global customer operations, said: “Today’s announcement builds on SAP’s commitment to enable strong, growing businesses that can seize the amazing opportunities of the digital economy.”

The news continues a long-standing partnership between the two tech giants, who have outlaid significant resources on pushing its brand into the cloud. IBM officially rebranded as a cloud-first organisation in March 2014, while SAP took to branding itself as ‘the’ cloud company in the same year, Naturally, the turnaround of the two companies’ major on-premise software revenues towards cloud has not been a painless process – IBM’s latest job cuts amount to up to one third of its total workforce according to reports – yet the long term vision is clear. The Armonk firm acquired Microsoft based software as a service (SaaS) provider Optevia last month.

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Imagine you had just arrived at London Euston railway station and wanted to walk to Leicester Square. A map from a well known search engine provider reliably informs us that it is roughly a 30 minute jaunt, but if you did not have that option, you could ask passers-by for directions ad nauseam at each junction until – assuming you do not get duff advice – you reach your destination.

This represents a good analogy for the state of more traditional networks – ‘move to the next hop in the network and a decision is made’ – versus software defined networking (SDN) with a controller, according to Michael Allen, EMEA VP and chief technical officer of network monitoring provider Dynatrace. He sees SDN, and its closely allied brethren, the software defined data centre (SDDC), as the next flavour of virtualisation, but it remains a little out of reach for large enterprises.

“Very, very few enterprises are doing it today, [but] many are looking at it,” Allen tells CloudTech. “It has the eye of the CTO office, it is the next wave of virtualisation, there’s a lot of promise behind it… [but] I have not seen one large enterprise introduction where we’re having to actually plug into an SDN-enabled network. So I think it’s still very much at the hype point.”

This view of the software defined data centre is shared by the analyst houses. A report from Gartner in September argued that, long term, it would be crucial for IT organisations – by 2020, the programmatic capabilities of an SDDC would be required for three in four Global 2000 Enterprises looking to deliver a DevOps and hybrid cloud approach.

Allen makes the comparison with cloud two years ago as to where software defined computing is today. “With cloud, I see so many large enterprises doing that today, putting mission critical platforms on public cloud,” he explains. “That’s where I see SDN today. When we talk about data centre virtualisation, it first started off with rationalisation, and then consolidation of workloads, and then we started to move into the more dynamic nature of it.

“I think today when we’re looking at SDN we’re starting to see more of the static nature of that, VPNs, and the tunnels being set up,” he adds. “The dynamic nature of it in terms of the control, of the intelligence – maybe that’s a couple of years out.”

Recent research appears to back that statement up. A report from 451 Research released last month argued software defined infrastructure (SDI) was a key growth area for the enterprise data centre – yet only one in five organisations polled (21%) said they had achieved SDI. Allen argues the survey results are not particularly surprising, but sounds a note of caution if it could be taken a step further.

“I think still today, we’re just starting to see in the last 12 to 18 months some of the initial SDN players who are kind of startup players now start to be acquired by the larger networking and optimisation players,” he says. “For the enterprises, it’s both a benefit for all of the promise having everything virtualised brings…but if we look at the complexity that dynamic virtualisation or VM migration had on trying to manage that software defined data centre, this for me is probably even worse than the complexity of just virtual machines moving around.

“If they’re in that ‘blueprint’ rigidity that keeps machines sensibly arranged with regards to physical infrastructure, you could have virtual machines running in the same web server, app server, or fabric stack,” Allen adds. “You’re not only dealing with the dynamics of the server virtualisation controllers, but you’re also dealing with the SDN controller’s decisions as well.

“So I think it’s going to be an even bigger headache for people to manage application user experience, application performance, as the network becomes more dynamic and less predictable.”

This is where Dynatrace aims to help in the form of greater visibility in the network. With the release of the latest version of its Data Center Real User Monitoring (DC RUM) software, Dynatrace aims to deliver end user and performance monitoring for software defined networks and, in time, speed up organisations’ transition to more service-oriented IT. The growing trend of shadow IT means the IT department needs to get some power back, according to Allen.

“Because we have visibility on all users, all transactions and all applications, whether it’s internally hosted, cloud hosted or third party, it allows IT to get a little bit back in control,” he explains. “We’re providing visibility getting control of all those services. What’s changed this week? Are there new services the business is using? Where are those services hosted? Are they compliant with corporate policy?

“If organisations put too many machines into a virtual LAN, you create a broadcast domain across the network that can actually end up slowing things down – if that domain is too large and too distributed, then it can cause massive issues for the physical infrastructure,” says Allen. “So providing end user performance visibility…takes those meaningful measures, like having a stopwatch sitting on the edge of the end user, and then when that performance is slowed being able to correlate it, not just to produce data that humans then have to look at, but to automatically do anomaly detection on that data.”

And so back to our intrepid traveller at Euston, who has decided to ditch the walking plan and go to Leicester Square by car, armed with a trusty sat nav. A roadblock has caused the software to recalibrate – and here the analogy provides a glimpse into the future challenges of software defined computing. “When you’re in a traffic jam on a road system, everyone’s sat navs behave the same,” says Allen, “so what might appear a quick route very quickly becomes highly congested – they’re not aware of the other traffic going on. I think that’s going to be a challenge moving forward. We’ve got these hybrid networks where SDN is being rolled in, but it’s not fully governing everything.”

The future of SDN and the SDDC is clearly bright – but there are still a few kinks to iron out before we get there.

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The divide between the IT and line of business departments, and the role of the IT department today, has frequently come in for scrutiny. Yet according to new research from Claranet, the role of IT continues to be one of cost cutting.

The survey, which polled 900 IT leaders across Europe, found almost half (46%) identify cost reduction as a core function for IT today, a number which has risen sharply from 34% the previous year. In terms of other priorities, revenue generation as an important role for IT to play was only cited by 29% of respondents, while only a quarter (25%) said they should help increase customer loyalty.

Not surprisingly, Claranet argues the need for a managed service provider to deal with the imbroglio between business and IT. “Any business looking to digitally transform their processes must have the right partners and suppliers in place to carry out those standard tasks universal to IT departments. By working with a managed service provider, CIOs can effectively outsource this work and spend more time working on strategy and revenue generating activities,” said Michel Robert, Claranet UK managing director.

“It is clear from the data that the focus on cost reduction and ‘keeping the lights on’ we witnessed in last year’s report has been maintained and, for many, has actually increased,” he added. “It goes without saying that costs are important, but it’s critical that IT departments can reposition themselves internally as enablers of business agility and innovation, rather than as cost centres.”

The position of IT as more of a traditional berth in keeping the lights on does appear somewhat out of date when factoring the maturation of the cloud market – but some old habits die hard. A recent study from 451 Research argues colocation, usually considered dead in the water with the rise of more affordable data centres, as the “nexus” of cloud and enterprise IT.

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Global colocation revenues are going up and are in track to reach more than $33bn (£23bn) by 2018 according to the latest forecast from 451 Research. Yet the latest figures, argue the analysts, mean the data centre industry is maturing rather than in any trouble.

2015 was the best year on record for deals in the data centre, hosting and managed services sector, according to 451. The two most prominent companies in the colocation space are Digital Realty and Equinix; the former commands the most real estate by square feet (7.8% of share), while the latter, despite having less than half of the footprint, coughs up the most annual revenues (8.1% compared to 5.6% for Digital Realty).

According to the research, the largest global region in terms of operational space is Asia Pacific (40.1%), followed by North America (33.7%) and EMEA (22.1%). By 2018, the overall footprint for global colocation will be at 176.5 million, up from 132.4 million today.

“Colocation is quickly becoming the nexus of both cloud and enterprise IT,” said Katie Broderick, 451 research director. “The colocation market is serving as ‘data centre arms dealer’ to both enterprises and the cloud. In this process, colocation is often becoming the strategic connection point between the two.”

These figures continue to be one in the eye for those who predicted cloud would kill the data centre. As a Logicworks post explained in February: “As enterprises begin to move ‘easy’ workloads to [providers such as] AWS, they want to move not-ready workloads to a managed environment outside their internal data centres.

“Colocation is rising in popularity precisely because enterprises want cloud,” it adds. “It fits well into a hybrid cloud plan, helps enterprises consolidate data centres, and helps transition people and processes to a shared responsibility model.”

For data centres overall, the leading market continues to be the US. According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, almost half (46%) of major cloud and internet data centre sites are based there, with China second placed at only 6% of coverage.