For a long time, Bill Gates and in fact the entire leadership team at Microsoft were vehemently against the open source community. Steve Ballmer had once called Linux “a malignant cancer” in reference to Linux allegedly violating nearly 235 patents that Microsoft owned. Even post-retirement, Bill Gates had once picked on open source claiming that this model creates a license that prevents anybody from improving the software. “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them”, he had said.

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• U.S.-based organisations are budgeting $1.77M for cloud spending in 2017 compared to $1.30M for non-U.S. based organisations.
• 10% of enterprises with over 1,000 employees are projecting they will spend $10M or more on cloud computing apps and platforms throughout this year.
• Organisations are using multiple cloud models to meet their business’s needs, including private (62%), public (60%), and hybrid (26%).
• By 2018 the typical IT department will have the minority of their apps and platforms (40%) residing in on-premise systems.

These and many other insights are from IDG’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, 2016. You can find the 2016 Cloud Computing Executive Summary here and a presentation of the results here.  The study’s methodology is based on interviews with respondents who are reporting they are involved with cloud planning and management across their organizations. The sampling frame includes audiences across six IDG Enterprise brands (CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World) representing IT and security decision-makers across eight industries. The survey was fielded online with the objective of understanding organisational adoption, use-cases, and solution needs for cloud computing. A total of 925 respondents were interviewed to complete the study.

Key takeaways include the following:

• The cloud is the new normal for enterprise apps, with 70% of all organizations having at least one app in the cloud today. 75% of enterprises with greater than 1,000 employees have at least one app or platform running in the cloud today, leading all categories of adoption measured in the survey. 90% of all organisations today either have apps running in the cloud are planning to use cloud apps in the next 12 months, or within 1 to 3 years. The cloud has won the enterprise and will continue to see the variety and breadth of apps adopted accelerating in 2017 and beyond.

• Business/data analytics and data storage/data management (both 43%) are projected to lead cloud adoption in 2017 and beyond. 22% of organisations surveyed are predicting that business/data analytics will be the leading cloud application area they will migrate to in the next 12 months. 21% are predicting data storage/data management apps are a high priority area for their organisations’ cloud migration plans in 2017.

• 28% of organisations’ total IT budgets is dedicated to cloud computing next year. Of that, 45% is allocated to SaaS, 30% to IaaS and 19% to PaaS. The average investment organisations will make in cloud computing next year is $1.62M, with enterprises over 1,000 employees projected to spend $3.03M. The average investment in cloud computing remains constant in organisations with $1.62M invested in 2014, $1.56M in 2015 and $1.62M in 2016. 10% of enterprises with over 1,000 employees are projecting they will spend $10M or more on cloud computing apps and platforms throughout this year.

• CIOs, IT architects and IT networking/management control cloud spending in the enterprise. In contrast, CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs are driving small and medium business (SMB) cloud spending this year. The following graphic compares how influential the following groups and individuals are in the cloud computing purchase process.

• Just 46% of organisations are using Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to integrate with databases, messaging systems, portals or storage components. 40% are using them for creating connections to the application layer of their cloud and the underlying IT infrastructures. The following graphic provides insights into how APIs are being used and which teams see the most value in them.

• In 18 months the majority of organisations’ IT infrastructures will be entirely cloud-based. IDG found that in 18 months nearly one-third (28%) of all organisations interviewed will be relying on private clouds as part of their IT infrastructure. Just over a fifth (22%) will have public cloud as part of their IT infrastructure, and 10% will be using hybrid. By 2018 the typical IT department will have the minority of their apps and platforms (40%) residing in on-premise systems.

• Concerns about where data is stored (43%), cloud security (41%) and vendor lock-in (21%) are the top three challenges organisations face when adopting public cloud technologies. Private and hybrid cloud adoption in organisations is also facing the challenges of cloud security and vendor lock-in. Private and hybrid cloud adoption are being slowed by a lack of the right skill sets to manage and gain the maximum value from cloud investments.

(c)iStock.com/RyanKing999

US tech giant CA Technologies has announced its intent to acquire business automation software provider Automic in a reported €600 million (£505m) deal.

The move is to enhance CA’s European reach, as well as adding automation and orchestration capabilities across its portfolio.

“With the acquisition of Automic, we will deliver automation, scale work flows and business processes while reducing costs and greatly improving accuracy,” said Ayman Sayed, CA Technologies president and chief product officer in a statement. “This level of intelligent automation will give our customers the insights to achieve more agility and realise business value.”

The acquisition plays into various strategic initiatives, with all the buzzwords you’d expect to find bundled in; DevOps, Internet of Things, hybrid, and so on. In other words, though, this means that organisations can automate their legacy SAP and Oracle business processes, as well as other workloads, from finance to job requests, to make organisations more proactive and productive long-term.

Writing for this publication in October, Chris Boorman, Automic CMO, discussed the importance of providing a multi-tenant offering for automation services, which helps enterprises serve multiple departments and clients on a single, shared platform. “In cloud computing, the meaning of multi-tenancy architecture has broadened because of new service models that take advantage of virtualisation and remote access,” Boorman wrote.

“This multi-tenant release automation model helps large enterprises – saddled with slow-moving, legacy infrastructures – to bridge the gap between development teams launching mobile and web-based services almost non-stop, and the operations team who are more concerned with maintaining reliability and continuity.

“A multi-tenant release automation product enables organisations like these to be agile in the back end, and be compliant and scalable in the front office,” Boorman added.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q417 for CA, with financial services firm Foros acting as advisor to the transaction.

Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. In the eyes of many, containers are at the brink of becoming a pervasive technology in enterprise IT to accelerate application delivery. In this presentation, attendees learned about the:
The transformation of IT to a DevOps, microservices, and container-based architecture
What are containers and how DevOps practices can operate in a container-based environment
A demonstration of how Docker and Kubernetes reduce software delivery cycle times, drive automation, and increase efficiency
How other organizations are using DevOps + containers and how to replicate their success

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“Venafi has a platform that allows you to manage, centralize and automate the complete life cycle of keys and certificates within the organization,” explained Gina Osmond, Sr. Field Marketing Manager at Venafi, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Without lifecycle traceability and visibility across the tool chain, stakeholders from Planning-to-Ops have limited insight and answers to who, what, when, why and how across the DevOps lifecycle. This impacts the ability to deliver high quality software at the needed velocity to drive positive business outcomes.
In his general session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Phil Hombledal, Solution Architect at CollabNet, discussed how customers are able to achieve a level of transparency that enables everyone from Planning-to-Ops to make informed decisions based on business priority and leverage automation to accelerate identifying issues and fast fix to drive continuous feedback and KPI insight.

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“We build IoT infrastructure products – when you have to integrate different devices, different systems and cloud you have to build an application to do that but we eliminate the need to build an application. Our products can integrate any device, any system, any cloud regardless of protocol,” explained Peter Jung, Chief Product Officer at Pulzze Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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“We are an all-flash array storage provider but our focus has been on VM-aware storage specifically for virtualized applications,” stated Dhiraj Sehgal of Tintri in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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