Water’s path from sea level to a cloud is quite a journey and often misunderstood, similar to that of an organizations path as they traverse from a traditional on premise compute model, to public and private cloud adoption. Infrastructure changes have a ripple effect, and impact functions across an organization, not just in IT, everything from executive management, to finance – and often cause unnecessary strife and significant project delays. With the cloud, large capital expenditures are converted into monthly recurring payments, lengthy sales cycles are turned into self-service models, resource intensive POCs, turned into easy to implement free trials – the list goes on and on. These require new strategies to get projects approved, fast tracked and successful – the legacy method of yearly or quarterly budgeting, and lengthy solution testing and analysis no longer applies, but changing that mindset is no easy task.
What’s Driving Business Technology Spending Disruption?
It’s a given, this year more CIOs will shift their focus from selective IT efficiency to overall IT effectiveness. In 2014 and beyond, enterprise IT leadership will be judged on their ability to meet the demands of tech-savvy Line of Business users.
This is the type of meaningful progress that CEOs have been anticipating. But that organizational realignment won’t always translate into higher budgets. Here’s why.
According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide IT spending will increase by just 4.1 percent in constant currency this year — that’s down from their previous forecast of 4.6 percent and also down from 2013 growth of 4.5 percent.
IDC believes that pent-up demand should eventually drive more business technology capital spending in the second half of 2014, as some organizations replace ageing infrastructure — including servers, storage and networking equipment. So, what caused this dip in IT spending?
“As smartphone growth continues to cool from the phenomenal expansion of the past few years, tablet shipments have also performed weaker than expected over the past couple of quarters,” said Stephen Minton, vice president at IDC.
Cloud Services will Disrupt Traditional IT Budgets
Around 10 percent of software spending will have already moved to the cloud by the end of 2014, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will represent 15 percent of all spending on servers and storage.
While this shift is creating significant disruption, it’s also driving equally significant short-term opportunities for smart CIOs and IT managers that can successfully deploy cloud-based solutions.
Meanwhile, both cloud and traditional IT spending will be driven by the underlying demand for server and storage capacity, fueled by the data generated from the previous explosive growth of mobile devices in the workplace.
The opportunity to extract value from this accumulated Big Data repository is also driving strong demand for analytics tools. How they decide to deploy these tools will be the subject of much debate among IT leaders.
Many organizations will choose a gradual journey to adopt cloud services — with security, reliability and regulatory factors in mind, they’ll likely deploy more open hybrid cloud solutions.
Global Pockets of New Business Technology Spending
Based upon IDC’s regional assessment, Western Europe is forecast to reach IT growth of 2 percent in constant currency terms, as most countries continue to shake off the debt crisis and return to a more stable business climate.
Similarly, business confidence is gradually improving in the U.S. market, after the sequester and government shutdown of last year. Server and storage spending will rebound to positive growth after last year’s slowdown, while IT services growth will accelerate to more than 2 percent.
In Canada, IT spending growth will accelerate from 3.3 percent last year to 5 percent in 2014 — mostly due to stronger spending on PCs, servers and storage.
Japan is a different story. The prior demand was largely consumed in 2013, when the government’s deflation-busting policies boosted business confidence and when IT buyers moved to take advantage of lower prices before new taxes came into effect at the beginning of 2014.
As a result, IT spending in Japan increased by 3.4 percent last year, but will decline by 1 percent in 2014.
SDN and Network Virtualization 101 for Clouds
Learn why network virtualization is the final frontier to conquer for high-utilization and high-performance clouds (since server and storage virtualization are already mature).
2013 was the year of SDN’s debut, but in his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Robert Drost, Co-Founder and COO of Pluribus Networks, will discuss how SDN’s relevant server-centric comparison for network virtualization (NV) is whether it operates like a server Type-I hypervisor (Bare Metal) or Type-II (Hosted). He will explain how OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Cisco ONE, VMware NSX, and others compare and work with server hypervisors and how to incorporate network virtualization in your cloud to improve analytics, compliance, management, scalability, reliability, cloudBursting, and billing features.
G-Cloud 5 is here: What’s improved, and what still needs to be done?
Updated 1819 GMT: Earlier this morning the UK government confirmed the fifth iteration of the G-Cloud cloud store was open, with 1132 suppliers making the cut and 1518 in total.
The list of suppliers for G-Cloud 5 was revealed at the end of last week, with plans to go live on Friday but for last minute bug fixes, as an official blog post confirmed.
CloudStore is open. http://t.co/MAHjtNA9dp There are now 1518 suppliers (885 SMEs) with over 17,000 services available.
— G-Cloud (@G_Cloud_UK) May 27, 2014
The latest round of procurement for G-Cloud had opened at the end of February, with Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude aiming at the time for a further £100m to be spent through the platform by May 2015 and outlining the various opportunities provided to small, innovative IT suppliers.
Yet a lot of the time the UK’s government cloud initiative has …
Salesforce.com aims to bring Dreamforce atmosphere to London
Sketch It was a throwaway comment made by Dr Steve Garnett, Salesforce EMEA president at the Salesforce1 World Tour London press briefing on Thursday, but it was a resonant one. Last week’s event felt like Dreamforce five or six years ago, he explained.
It was meant to signify both the atmosphere of the event as well as the growth of Salesforce.com in the UK – and the keynote went flash, bang, wallop into this.
“We’re seeing record crowds, everywhere we go, around the world, because people are hungry to learn about the future,” George Hu, Salesforce COO, explained. 10,000 registered attendees can‘t be wrong, and this future was the new Salesforce1 mobile app, enabling anyone to run their business purely on their mobile device.
“Just imagine how instantly more productive you were if every one of your salespeople had that in their hands,” noted Fergus Griffin …
Linux and Cloud Storage: a Story of Unrequited Love?
It is said that 95% of all supercomputers run Linux, so why do they still not get an invitation to the party? If you look at any cloud storage review, you will quickly notice that Linux users are often times left as an afterthought. So what do cloud storage providers have to offer Linux users?
Thankfully, a lot. There are three main ways you can regain glory with your Linux system. Firstly, connection. Linux users have the option to connect an online system to your Linux user interface. As all Linux users will know, the user interface is comprised of one of two things; either the command-line interface or the graphical user interface. There are a plethora of graphical user-interfaces that can run with many if not all versions of Linux. These include: GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, LXDE, MATE, Enlightenment, Pantheon, Trinity and Sugar. The most common of which are GNOME and KDE desktops. Additionally, these two desktops are more often than not supported by cloud storage providers. Linux also offers its power users the option of a command line interface.
Extenua Cloud2Drive Software Stories Enterprise Data in the Cloud
Extenua Inc., a pioneering developer of enterprise software that simplifies and secures the use of cloud technologies, announced the general availability of Cloud2Drive. Extenua’s Cloud2Drive enables enterprises of any size to securely store data in the cloud and access it without interruption. Enterprises can reduce costs and improve service levels for local, remote and mobile users by deploying Cloud2Drive. The software is based on patent-pending technology that can aggregate data from multiple cloud providers, increase availability, accessibility and sharing, both offline and online. It is unique, too, because it encrypts data independent of the cloud provider, thus increasing security, control and maintaining compliance by the enterprise that owns the data.
DevOps Summit Power Panel: How DevOps Is Changing the Way IT Works
Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. From showcase success stories from early adopters and web-scale businesses, DevOps is expanding to organizations of all sizes, including the world’s largest enterprises – and delivering real results.
In this DevOps Summit Power Panel, on June 9 at our New York City studio, led by conference chair Roger Strukhoff, Kevin Behr, founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and the Chief Strategist for the CIO and Board Advisory Practice at Assemblage Pointe; JP Morgenthal, Director, Cloud Computing Practice at Perficient, Inc.; and John Willis, VP of Customer Enablement for Stateless Networks; will discuss how DevOps is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.
An Evolved Approach to Scaling IT
“Most on-premise vendors recognize the need for a SaaS model with a self-service sales model,” observed Dustin Whittle, Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “Companies are often having trouble making the migration to the cloud, because it is a fundamental change in the business model for many old school software companies.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
Dustin Whittle: Standards initiatives like OpenStack make it easy for cloud vendors to offer interoperability and ultimately the freedom of choice for consumers. It simplifies the initial investment required for cloud vendors since these open standards and open source tools make them easier to support.
Powering the Mobile Enterprise
Delivering modern application experiences requires a cloud based architecture that unlocks the silos of process and information within the organization. These capabilities must be resident in the cloud, and easily consumed by mobile applications.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Dan Sholler, Vice President, Platform and Technology at Infor, will discuss a common approach to access application capability, end to end process automation, and information stores designed to enable modern applications experiences, which are mostly or exclusively mobile.