Today’s workforce is trading their cubicles and corporate desktops in favor of an any-location, any-device work style. And as digital natives make up more and more of the modern workforce, the appetite for user-friendly, cloud-based services grows. The center of work is shifting to the user and to the cloud. But managing a proliferation of SaaS, web, and mobile apps running on any number of clouds and devices is unwieldy and increases security risks. PJ Hough, Citrix Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, discusses improving personal productivity with an evolved approach supporting modern workstyles and simplifying IT complexities to deliver the right experience to the right user at the right time, on any device.

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ShieldX’s CEO and Founder, Ratinder Ahuja, believes that traditional security solutions are not designed to be effective in the cloud. The role of Data Loss Prevention must evolve in order to combat the challenges of changing infrastructure associated with modernized cloud environments. Ratinder will call out the notion that security processes and controls must be equally dynamic and able to adapt for the cloud. Utilizing four key factors of automation, enterprises can remediate issues and improve their security posture by maximizing their investments in legacy DLP solutions. The factors include new infrastructures opening up, public cloud, fast services and appliance models to fit in the new world of cloud security.

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Is your enterprise growing the right skills to fight the digital transformation (DX) battles? With 69% of enterprises describing the DX skill drought as being soft skills, rather than technology skills, are you ready to survive against disrupters?

The next wave of business disruption is already crashing on your enterprise as AI, Blockchain and IoT change the nature and location of business. Now is the time to prepare. Drawing on experiences with large and midsize enterprises, Marco Coulter tabulates the skills needed to survive DX while innovating at scale. He will start with a focus on the ‘lingua franca’ or common language between business and technology needed for today’s digitally savvy or agile enterprise.

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Transitioning to the cloud is not so much taking a fresh plot of land and building up from there, but more trying to renovate an existing property. For larger organisations with sprawling IT outfits, it can be particularly complicated even once the bulk of the work has been done, with on-premise systems here, public cloud workloads there, and private cloud in between.

What’s more, organisations are realising that one size may not fit all just for cloud, but for public cloud. Take Netflix as a key example. Industry media tried to storm up a brouhaha last year when it was reported the streaming company, famously an Amazon Web Services (AWS) house, was using Google Cloud for certain workloads. Yet Netflix told this publication at the time there was ‘no change’ in its relationship with AWS and that it had been using Google for ‘a while’.

Rather than any great revelation, the Netflix story simply emphasised the IT needs of fast-paced organisations today. But as cloud complexity gets more important, so does the need to secure and monitor it.

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are therefore becoming a very hot property in the industry. Like any technology subset, it can take time before industry validation. Gartner, which defines a CMP simply as ‘integrated products that provide for the management of public, private and hybrid cloud environments’, recently released its first Magic Quadrant in the area.

“What it’s telling IT organisations is that cloud management platforms have come of age, and here are the key players in that space,” explains Dan Murphy, CMO of Embotics, which is placed as a leader in the Quadrant. “For Embotics, and in particular our vCommander solution and cloud management in general, it means we are now essential technology, something that every large IT organisation needs – especially those that are adopting hybrid IT.”

It may be prudent here to explore just what an entangled enterprise IT stack looks like. Their infrastructure is likely to be a mix of on-premise and cloud. They may have had the vision of a connected Internet of Things (IoT) setup a decade ago – but back then it was all managed in the data centre, before moving to virtualised environments until the toes were dipped into the cloud.

Cloud management platforms are now essential technology, something that every large IT organisation needs – especially those that are adopting hybrid IT

In other words, it’s a mess – and a good CMP is able to manage everything along simultaneously while still providing value added services to end users. “Enterprises have set objectives to embrace public cloud services and lower costs. The IT department’s role is changing in this model to provide governance and enablement across hybrid IT,” said Murphy. “Many organisations believe public cloud is strategic, but they’ve also got a legacy infrastructure of on-premise applications to manage.”

As a result, CMPs have to be equipped with a variety of features, from provisioning and orchestration, to cost management, to cloud migration and backup. Murphy says many IT organisations end up serving as a ‘broker’. “Using an analogy of leasing a company car, instead of saying an employee can select any car, we’re saying ‘go to this dealer, and you can choose any car under this budget and with this safety rating,’” he explains. “That’s what we see an evolving role to be – ‘these are resources that have been curated by IT, and the organisation in general and here’s what you can choose from’, versus giving people the keys to the castle or in this case unrestricted and ungoverned access to the public cloud.”

This mentality has ensured that the conversation is changing not just between lines of business and IT, but within IT itself. From having dedicated security, networking and VMware experts, IT has become more of an enabling group which aims to give as frictionless access as possible to the technology – bearing in mind employees simply want the tools to do their job properly – but to also provide governance. This is again where CMPs can come into play; being tools which can help IT in this new, fleshed-out role.

Ultimately, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms gives an optimistic view of the landscape and where these companies sit. Yet there is naturally also a word of caution. Increasingly, it feels as though that AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google hold all the aces, and wherever they go, others follow. Murphy argues that in these areas – keeping up with R&D, and exploring concepts such as serverless computing – some vendors will fall away. “Embotics has always been at the forefront of innovation and we are committed to providing a management platform that enhances hybrid IT operations now and as new technologies emerge,” he adds.

Editor’s note: This article is in association with Embotics.

The collaboration software market continues to go up, with cloud-based collaboration growing more quickly and ‘strong’ growth expected for at least the next five years.

That’s the verdict of analyst firm Synergy Research in its latest note which argues cloud collaboration continues to ‘drive and disrupt’ the $45 billion-rated overall collaboration market.

Total worldwide third quarter revenues from collaboration, including on-premise, hosted and cloud-based solutions, hit almost $11 billion, with Synergy expecting Q4’s total to be ‘substantially higher.’

The research focused on the unified comms (UC) market – an area which only accounts for one tenth of the overall collaboration space but one with continued clear potential for growth. Of the different buckets which comprise UC, teamwork applications are considered by far the quickest growing. Synergy noted Slack as a ‘particularly noteworthy’ company as it more than doubled in size year on year.

This can be compared with Synergy’s figures released at the start of the year which priced the total cloud market at $250 billion, with 32% annual growth. Unified comms as a service (UCaaS) saw a 20% uptick, with RingCentral, Mitel, and 8×8 cited as key vendors. Perhaps surprisingly given its saturation, IaaS and PaaS continued to be the strongest growing area at 50%. Previous years saw its growth at more than 100%, but given the size of the market and the ‘law of large numbers’, as Synergy put it, this was not seen as a major surprise.

“Collaboration continues to be a somewhat fragmented market with many disruptive and high-growth companies targeting specific technology areas. That being said, the overall trend is quite clear in that traditional on-premise sales are shrinking and being replaced by cloud-based communication services,” said Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst at Synergy.

“There is now wide adoption of these new emerging cloud services and our forecasts show that they will continue to grow strongly over the next five years,” added Duke.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

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When Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest big data behemoths, first announced they were coming together in a $5.2 billion blockbuster merger in October, the questions were almost infinite. Yet the most important two seemed to be: why now? And what does the future hold?

Now, after the transaction officially closed earlier this month, the answers can be a little more candid. Perhaps surprisingly, the new company admits the move came about as a result of feeling the heat from its traditional competitor base as well as the public cloud giants.

Here’s what we know about the deal:

• Conversations between Cloudera and Hortonworks around M&A activity had started as far back as 2015 with various factors meaning last summer was ‘the right time for both businesses’ to merge
• The new company will be called Cloudera going forward – the common platform which results will be called Cloudera Data Platform aimed as a nod to the Hortonworks Data Platform suite
• The first technical kick-off of the joined entity took place earlier this month in Scottsdale, Arizona. Cloudera says ‘80%-85%’ of the most burning issues around overlapping product sets were able to be resolved there

It’s usually good if you know you’re under pressure to face up and admit it rather than endlessly be in denial. And it’s even better if, like Cloudera, you have an action plan to resolve the situation.

Chief marketing officer Mick Hollison (left) notes that, despite the arrows coming in from two different fronts, the challenges are broadly similar. The company’s software, as well as its strategy, is based around what it is calling the ‘enterprise data cloud’. The strategy is based around three strands; supporting every possible cloud implementation, from hybrid to public to multi-cloud; supporting a wide range of analytic capabilities; and going the extra mile on an open philosophy, from open storage, to compute, to integration.

Getting this mix right, Cloudera hopes, will satisfy even the largest and most demanding enterprise customers – and put them one step ahead of the competition in the process.

“If I look at the public cloud providers, they’re inherently never going to be multi-cloud,” Hollison tells CloudTech. “You’ll continue to see [them] dipping toes more into hybrid – [it’s] future state but something they plan to get into. Multi is something they’re not likely to get into.

“The second part public cloud vendors will struggle with a bit is that security and governance and common metadata layer,” Hollison adds. “That doesn’t exist for those vendors today. If you buy EMR from Amazon and you also buy RedShift from Amazon, you get a different security, governance and metadata stack with each of those offerings. We offer commonality at that layer.”

Looking at the more traditional big data companies – the word traditional being used loosely – Hollison again pulls no punches. “If I look across the way, with the more purpose-built data warehouse cloud [vendors], those companies and those offerings are very compelling for their one function that they offer. They’re not at a point where they’re building out their technology into a platform they can offer a set of shared services across.”

It’s worth noting here that Cloudera freely admits it hasn’t got all the pieces in place yet. Yet one element which all sides can agree on is that customer expectations have skyrocketed in recent years. “The expectations are seemingly infinite,” says Hollison. “The raw scale and quantity of data consumption by our largest customers is just orders of magnitude beyond what any of us could have ever imagined not terribly long ago.

“The other dimension is that customers have high demands around cloud,” Hollison adds. “Many of our large enterprises customers have a bit of a concern around being locked in to any one cloud vendor. Regardless of partnership, they don’t want to take the public cloud on as a new version of an IBM or Oracle lock-in.”

Part of this heightened sense of expectation is around the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML); a necessary strategic point for the vendors. A report from venture capital firm Work-Bench in August predicted that ‘all modern [business intelligence] vendors to either release an automated machine learning product or buy a startup’ by the end of 2019.

Cloudera was ahead of this curve buying data science platform Sense.io in 2016, with the technology acquired forming the backbone of the company’s Data Science Workbench product. “It’s a very logical step from my point of view,” Hollison says of fusing AI and ML with big data. “The term we’ve been using is to ‘industrialise AI’, to make it more like a factory.

“Most of the ML and AI that has been done in enterprises to date has been pretty bespoke. It hasn’t necessarily been done against well secured and governed data sets supported by IT,” adds Hollison. “It’s often been scraped onto a laptop by a data scientist, putting that data at risk. When you combine data security and management capabilities that Cloudera offers, with an easy to use workbench that allows them to continue to use the languages and frameworks that they like, it’s a pretty good combination that makes both the data scientists and IT happy that data is being used in an intelligent way.”

Going forward, Hollison promises a lot of hard work on integrating and hardening the sales operations, as well as more go-to-market pieces. Yet in other areas progress has been more seamless than one would expect. The companies noted that approximately two thirds of each other’s code base had commonality, while the engineering teams were easier to satiate.

“You might have thought we’d have more challenges on that front, but what I think people forget is a lot of these engineers have been working together for upwards of 10 years in the open source community,” he says. “Even though the big corporate push might have been very competitive, at a code-writing, engineering level, there’s a lot of mutual respect between the teams.”

While there’s still a lot to do, the building blocks are in place. “We knew we would be a much stronger, more formidable competitor together than we would be continuing to take shots at one another,” adds Hollison.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.