Tag Archives: cloud

Cloud computing, cloud service broker, Featured, IaaS, IT Management

Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now? Part II

March 6, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

In my last post, I discussed Cloud Service Brokers and some of their benefits after reading a couple of articles from Robin Meehan (Article 1 here and Article 2 here). In this post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree with each.

At the end of last post, I was breaking down cloud arbitrage into three areas (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time). Credit to Robin for run-time and deployment-time arbitrage. I really like those terms, and I think it illuminates the conversation. So, run-time cloud arbitrage is really science fiction right now – this is where the CSB moves running workloads around on the fly to find the best benefit for the customer. I haven’t seen any technology (yet) that does this. However, VMware does deployment-time and run-time arbitrage with VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduling – albeit, in a single virtual datacenter, with individual VMs, and with a single policy objective to balance a cluster’s load across vSphere nodes. See Duncan Epping’s excellent write up on DRS here. Even 10 years ago, this was not possible. 15 years ago, this was certainly science fiction. Now, it’s pretty common to have DRS enabled for all of your vSphere clusters.

A few of Robin’s points…

Point 1:
“The ability to migrate IT workloads dynamically (i.e. at run-time, not at deployment time) is something I sometimes see as a capability under the ‘cloud broker’ banner, but in my view it really just doesn’t make sense – at least not at the moment.”

I agree. Run-time cloud arbitrage and workload migration ala vMotion is not possible today in cloud. Will it be possible within the next few years? Absolutely. I think it will first manifest itself in a VMware High Availability-like scenario. Again, see Duncan Epping’s fantastic deep-dive into HA. If cloud provider X drops off of the internet suddenly, then restart the resources and application at cloud provider Y (where cloud provider Y might even be your own datacenter). This is sometimes known as DR as a service, or DRaaS. And even now, there are some DRaaS solutions that are coming onto the market.

Point 2:
“The rate of innovation in the IaaS/PaaS/DaaS market is such that most of the other vendors are playing catch-up with AWS, as AWS continue to differentiate themselves from the following pack. This shows no sign of slowing down over the next couple of years – so the only way a migrated workload is going to work across multiple cloud vendors is if it only relies on the lowest common denominator functionality across the vendors, which is typically basic storage, virtualised compute and connectivity.”

Also agree, the rate of innovation in the market for cloud computing is rapid as specialization sets in at an industrial level. This also means that downward price pressures are enormous for vendors in the cloud space, even today as vendors vie for market share. As switching costs decrease (e.g., portability of applications increases), prices for IaaS will decrease even more. Now, wouldn’t you, as a customer, like to take advantage of this market behavior? Take in to consideration that CSBs aggregate providers but they also aggregate customer demand. If you believe this interpretation of the market for IaaS, then you’ll want to position yourself to take advantage of it by planning portability for your applications. A CSB can help you do this.

Point 3:
“The bottom line is that if you are going to architect your applications so they can run on any cloud service provider, then you can’t easily use any of the good bits and hence your value in migrating to a cloud solution is diminished. Not ruined, just reduced.”

Disagree. To take advantage of market behavior, customers should look to avoid using proprietary features of IaaS platforms because they compromise portability. Like we noted earlier, increased portability of applications means more flexibility to take advantage of market behavior that leads to decreasing prices.

This is where perspective on cloud becomes really important. For example, GreenPages has a customer with a great use case for commodity IaaS. They may deploy ~800 machines in a cluster at AWS for only a matter of hours to run a simulation or solve a problem. After the result is read, these machines are completely destroyed—even the data. So, it makes no difference to this customer where they do this work. AWS happens to be the convenient choice right now. Next quarter, it may be Azure, who knows? I’m absolutely certain that this customer sees more benefit in avoiding the use of propriety features (a.k.a., the “good bits” of cloud) in a cloud provider rather than using them.

What is your perspective on cloud?
• A means to improve time to market and agility
• A way to transform capex into opex
• Simply a management paradigm – you can have cloud anywhere, even internally as long as you have self-service and infinite resources
• An enabler for a new methodology like DevOps
• Simply a destination for applications

I think that a good perspective may include all of these things. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Interested in learning more? Download this free whitepaper ‘Cloud Management, Now!’

Cloud computing, cloud service broker, Featured, Public Cloud

Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now?

March 4, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Robin Meehan of Smart421 recently wrote a couple of great posts on cloud service brokers (CSBs) and the role that they play for consumers of cloud services. (http://smart421.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/were-mostly-all-cloud-services-brokers-now/ and http://smart421.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cloud-brokerage-and-dynamic-it-workload-migration/). I’m going to write two blogs about the topic. The first will be a background on my views and interpretations around cloud service brokers. In the second post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree.

Essentially, a cloud broker offers consumers three key things that a single cloud provider does not (these are from the NIST definition of a Cloud Service Broker):

Intermediation
Aggregation
Arbitrage (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time)

My interpretation of these is as follows. We’ll use Amazon Web Services as the example IaaS cloud provider and GreenPages as the example of the cloud broker:

Intermediation. As a cloud broker, GreenPages, sits between you, the consumer, and AWS. GreenPages and other CSBs do this so they can add value to the core AWS offering. Why? Billing and chargeback is a great example. A bill from AWS includes line item charges for EC2, S3, and whichever other services you used during the past month – so you would be able to see that EC2 charges for January were $12,502.90 in total. GreenPages takes this bill and processes it so that you would be able to get more granular information about your spend in January. We would be able to show you:

Spend per application
Spend per environment (development, test, production)
Spend per tier (web, application, database)
Spend per resource (CPU, memory, storage, managed services)
Compare January 2014 to December, or even January 2013
Estimate the spend for February 2014

So, going directly to AWS, you’d be able to answer a question like, “how much did I spend in total for compute in January?”

And, going through GreenPages as a cloud broker, you’d be able to answer a question like, “how much did the development environment for Application X cost in January, and how does that compare with the spend in December?”

I think you’d agree that it is easier to wrap governance around the spend information from a cloud service broker rather than directly from AWS. This is just one of the advantages of using a CSB in front of a cloud provider – even if you’re like many customers out there and choose to use only one provider.

Aggregation. As a CSB, GreenPages aggregates the offerings from many providers and provides a simple interface to provision resources to any of them. Whether you choose AWS, Terremark, Savvis, or even your internal vSphere environment, you’d use the same procedure to provision resources. On the provider side, CSBs also aggregate demand from consumers and are able to negotiate rates. Why is this important? A CSB can add value in three ways here:

1) By allowing you to compare the offerings of different providers – in terms of pricing, SLA guarantees, service credits, supported configurations, etc.

2) By placing a consistent approval framework in front of requests to any provider.

3) By using aggregated demand to negotiate special pricing and terms with providers – terms that may not be available to an individual consumer of cloud services

The approval framework is of course optional – if you wish, you could choose to allow any user to provision infrastructure to any provider. Either way, a CSB can establish a request management framework in front of “the cloud” and can, in turn, provide things like an audit trail of requests and approvals. Perhaps you want to raise an ITIL-style change whenever a cloud request is fulfilled? A CSB can integrate with existing systems like Remedy or ServiceNow for that.

Arbitrage. Robin Meehan has a follow-on post that alludes to cloud arbitrage and workload migration. Cloud arbitrage is somewhat science fiction at this time, but let’s look forward to the not-too-distant future.

First, what is arbitrage and cloud arbitrage? NIST says it is an environment where the flexibility to CSB has the flexibility to choose, on the customer’s behalf, where to best run the customer’s workload. In theory, the CSB would always be on the lookout for a beneficial arrangement, automatically migrate the workload, and likely capture the financial benefit of doing so. This is a little bit like currency arbitrage, where a financial institution is looking for discrepancies in the market for various currencies, and makes various transactions to come up with a beneficial situation. If you’ve ever seen the late-night infomercials for forex.com, don’t believe the easy money hype. You need vast sums of money and perfect market information (e.g., you’re pretty much a bank) to play in that game.

So, cloud arbitrage and “just plain currency arbitrage” are really only similar when it comes to identifying a good idea. This is where we break it down cloud arbitrage into three areas:

Run-time arbitrage
Deployment-time arbitrage
Plan-time arbitrage

In my next post, I will break down cloud arbitrage as well as go over some specific points Robin makes in his posts and offer my opinions on them.

To learn more about transforming your IT Department to a broker of IT services download this ebook

Cloud computing, Featured, ITaaS, Public Cloud, SDDC

The Big Shift: From Cloud Skeptics & Magic Pills to ITaaS Nirvana

February 27, 2014 Journey to the Cloud

By Ron Dupler, CEO GreenPages Technology Solutions

Over the last 4-6 quarters, we have seen a significant market evolution, with our customers and the overall market moving from theorizing about cloud computing to defining strategies and plans to reap the benefits of cloud computing solutions and implement hybrid cloud models. In a short period of time we’ve seen IT thought leaders move from debating the reality and importance of cloud computing, to trying to understand how to most effectively grasp the benefits of cloud computing to improve organizational efficiency, velocity, and line of business empowerment. Today, we see the leading edge of the market aggressively rationalizing their application architectures and driving to hybrid cloud computing models.

Internally, we call this phenomenon The Big Shift. Let’s discuss what we know about The Big Shift. First for all of the cloud skeptics reading this, it is an undeniable fact that corporate application workloads are moving from customer owned architectures to public cloud computing platforms. RW Baird released an interesting report in Q’4 of 2013 that included the following observations:

Corporate workloads are moving to the public cloud.
Much of the IT industry has been asleep at the wheel as Big Shift momentum has accelerated due to the fact that public cloud spending still represents a small portion of overall IT spend.
Traditional IT spending is growing in the low single digits. 2-3% per year is a good approximation.
Cloud spending is growing at 40% plus per year.
What we call The Big Shift is accelerating and is going to have a tremendous impact on the traditional IT industry in the coming years. For every $1.00 increase in public cloud spending, there is a corresponding $3.00-$4.00 decrease in customer-owned IT spend.

There are some other things we know about The Big Shift:

The Big Shift is disrupting old industry paradigms and governance models. We see market evidence of this in traditional IT industry powerhouses like HP and Dell struggling to adapt and reinvent themselves and to maintain relevance and dominance in the new ITaaS era. We even saw perennial powerhouse Cisco lower its 5 year growth forecast during last calendar Q’4 due to the forces at play in the market. In short, the Big Shift is driving disruption throughout the entire IT supply chain. Companies tied to the traditional, customer-owned IT world are finding themselves under financial pressures and are struggling to adapt. Born in the cloud companies like Amazon are seeing tremendous and accelerating growth as the market embraces ITaaS.

In corporate America, the Big Shift is causing inertia as corporate IT leaders and their staffs reassess their IT strategies and strive to determine how best to execute their IT initiatives in the context of the tremendous market change going on around them. We see many clients who understand the need to drive to an ITaaS model and embrace hybrid cloud architectures but do not know how best to attack that challenge and prepare to manage in a hybrid cloud world. This lack of clarity is causing delays in decision making and stalling important IT initiatives.

Let’s discuss cloud for a bit. Cloud computing is a big topic that elicits emotional reactions. Cloud-speak is pervasive in our industry. By this point, the vast majority of your IT partners and vendors are couching their solutions as cloud, or as-a-service, solutions. Some folks in the industry are bold enough to tell you that they have the magic cloud pill that will lead you to ITaaS nirvana. Due to this, many IT professionals that I speak with are sick of talking about cloud and shy away from the topic. My belief is that this avoidance is counterproductive and driven by cloud pervasiveness, lack of precision and clarity when discussing cloud, and the change pressure the cloud revolution is imposing on all professional technologists. The age old mandate to embrace change or die has never been more relevant. Therefore, we feel it is imperative to tackle the cloud discussion head on.

Download our free whitepaper “Cloud Management, Now“

Let me take a stab at clarifying the cloud discussion. Figure 1 below represents the Big Shift. As noted above, it is undeniable that workloads are shifting from private, customer owned IT architectures, to public, customer rented platforms, i.e. the public cloud. We see three vectors of change in the industry that are defining the cloud revolution.

The first vector is the modernization of legacy, customer-owned architectures. The dominant theme here over the past 5-7 years has been the virtualization of the compute layer. The dominant player during this wave of transformation has been VMware. The first wave of virtualization has slowed in the past 4-6 quarters as the compute virtualization market has matured and the vast majority of x86 workloads have been virtualized. There is a new second wave that is just forming and that will be every bit as powerful and important as the first wave. This wave is represented by new, advanced forms of virtualization and the continued abstraction of more complex components of traditional IT infrastructure: networking, storage, and ultimately entire datacenters as we move to a world of software defined datacenter (SDDC) in the coming years.

The second vector of change in the cloud era involves deploying automation, orchestration, and service catalogues to enable private cloud computing environments for internal users and lines of business. Private cloud environments are the industry and corporate IT’s reaction to the public cloud providers’ ability to provide faster, cheaper, better service levels to corporate end users and lines of business. In short, the private cloud change vector is driven by the fact that internal IT now has competition. Their end users and lines of business, development teams in particular, have new service level expectations based on their consumer experiences and their ability to get fast, cheap, commodity compute from the likes of Amazon. To compete, corporate IT staffs must enable self-service functionality for their lines of business and development teams by deploying advanced management tools that provide automation, orchestration, and service catalogue functionality.

The third vector of change in the cloud era involves tying the inevitable blend of private, customer-owned architectures together with the public cloud platforms in use today at most companies. The result is a true hybrid cloud architectural model that can be managed, preserving the still valid command and control mandates of traditional corporate IT, and balancing those mandates with the end user empowerment and velocity expected in today’s cloud world.

In the context of these three change vectors we see several approaches within our customer base. We see some customers taking a “boil the ocean” approach and striving to rationalize their entire application portfolios to determine best execution venues and define a path to a true hybrid cloud architecture. We see other customers taking a much more cautious approach and leveraging cloud-based point solutions like desktop and disaster recovery as-a-service to solve old business problems in new ways. Both approaches are valid and depend on uses cases, budgets, and philosophical approach (aggressive, leading-edge, versus conservative follow-the-market thinking).

GreenPages business strategy in the context of the ITaaS and cloud revolution is simple. We have built an organization that has the people, process, and technologies to provide expert strategic guidance and proven cloud-era solutions for our clients through a historical inflection point in the way that information technology is delivered to corporate end users and lines of business. Our cloud management as a service offering (CMaaS) provides a technology platform that helps customers integrate the disparate management tools deployed in their environments and federate alerts through an enterprise command center approach that gives a singular view into physical, virtual, and public cloud workloads. CMaaS also provides cloud service brokerage and governance capabilities allowing our customers to view price-performance analytics across private and public cloud environments, design service models and view the related bills of material, and view and consolidate billings across multiple public cloud providers. What are your thoughts on the Big Shift? How is your organization addressing the changes in the IT landscape?

Featured, IaaS, IT Management

Don’t Be a Michael Scott – Embrace Change in IT

February 20, 2014 Journey to the Cloud

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

One of the biggest impediments to the adoption of new technologies is resistance to change. Many IT departments are entrenched and content in the way they currently run IT. But as the technology industry continues to embrace IT-as-a-Service, IT departments must be receptive to change if they want to stay competitive.

I’m a big fan of the TV show The Office. In my opinion, it’s the second funniest series behind Seinfeld (and it’s a very close second). Dunder Mifflin Scranton Regional Manager Michael Scott is a quintessential example of a decision maker who’s against the adoption of new technologies because of fear, a lack of understanding, and downright stubbornness.

In the “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” episode in Season Four, the young, newly promoted hot-shot exec (and former intern) Ryan Howard returns to the Scranton branch to reveal his plan on how he’s going to use technology to revitalize the company. Part of his plan is the rollout of a new website that will allow Dunder Mifflin to be more agile and allow customers to make purchases online. Michael and his loyal sidekick (and part-time beet farmer) Dwight Schrute are staunchly opposed to this idea.

At this point in the episode Michael is against Ryan’s idea of leveraging technology to improve the business process out of pure stubbornness. Michael hasn’t heard Ryan’s strategy or thought out the pros and cons of leveraging technology to improve business processes. His mindset is simply “How can this new technology possibly be better than the way we have always done things?”

Maybe your company has always bought infrastructure and run it in house—so why change now? Well, running a hybrid cloud environment can provide better service to your end users and also contribute to cost savings. Regardless if you act or not, it’s something you need to keep an open mind about and look into closely. Dismissing the concept immediately isn’t going to do you any good.

Creed Bratton is the oldest employee in the Scranton office. After hearing Ryan’s announcement about implementing new technologies, Creed gets extremely worried that he’s going to get squeezed out of his job. He goes to Michael and shares his concerns that both their jobs may be in jeopardy. At this point, Michael is now against the adoption of technology due to a lack of understanding. Ryan’s plan is to retrain his employees so that they have the knowledge and skillset to leverage new technologies to improve the business—not to use it as a means to downsize the workforce.

This is similar to the fear that cloud computing will cause widespread layoffs of IT workers. This is not necessarily the case. It’s not about reducing jobs; it’s about retraining current employees to take on new roles within the department.

Ryan claims that the new website is going to significantly increase sales. Michael and Dwight set out on a road trip to win back several key customers whose accounts they have recently lost to competitors to prove to Ryan that they don’t need a website. Their strategy? Personally deliver fruit baskets. Each customer ends up turning them down because the vendors they are currently using have websites and offer lower prices.

In this case, Dunder Mifflin’s lack of IT innovation is directly affecting its bottom line. They’re making it an easy decision for customers to leave because they simply aren’t keeping pace with the competition. As a modern day IT department, you need to be leveraging technologies that allow people to do their jobs easier and in turn reduce costs for the organization. For example, by installing a SaaS-based marketing automation tool (i.e. HubSpot), your marketing team can automate workloads and spend more time generating leads for the sales team to drive revenue. By using Amazon, or another IaaS platform, you have the ability to buy only the capacity you actually need, saving on infrastructure hardware capital and maintenance costs. For workloads that make more sense running on-prem, creating a private cloud environment with a service catalog can streamline performance and give users the ability to choose and instantly receive the IT services they need.

At the end of the episode, an enraged Michael and Dwight head back to the office. On their way back, Michael’s GPS instructs him to take a right hand turn. Dwight looks at the screen and tells Michael that it’s saying to bear right around the bend, but Michael takes the sharp right trusting the machine and follows it…directly into a lake. Dwight shouts that he’s trained for this moment and jumps in the two feet of water to valiantly save Michael. When they get back to the office Michael announces “I drove my car into a [bleep] lake. Why you may ask did I do this? Well, because of a machine. A machine told me to drive into a lake. And I did it! I did it because I trusted Ryan’s precious technology, and look where it got me.” At this point, Michael is resisting technology because of fear.

In today’s changing IT landscape, embarking on new IT initiatives can be scary. There are risks involved, and there are going to be bumps along the way. (Full disclosure, Ryan ends up getting arrested later in the season for fraud after placing orders multiple times in the system—but you get the idea.)But at the end of the day, the change now taking place in IT is inevitable. To be successful, you need to carefully, and strategically, plan out projects and make sure you have the skillsets to get the job done properly (or use a partner like GreenPages to help).The risk of adopting new technologies is nothing compared to the risk of doing nothing and being left behind. Leave a comment and share how your organization is dealing with the changing IT landscape…or let me know what your favorite Office episode is…

If you’d like to talk more about how GreenPages can help with your IT transformation strategy, fill out this form!

Cloud computing, Featured, IaaS, PaaS, Saas

The PaaS Market as We Know it Will Not Die Off

January 23, 2014 John Dixon

I’ve been hearing a lot about Platform as a Service (PaaS) lately as part of the broader discussion of cloud computing from both customers and in articles across the web. In this post, I’ll describe PaaS, discuss a recent article that came out on the subject, and take a shot at sorting out IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

What is PaaS?

First a quick trip down memory lane for me. As an intern in college, one of my tours of duty was through the manufacturing systems department at an automaker. I came to work the first day to find a modest desktop computer loaded with all of the applications I needed to look busy, and a nicely printed sheet with logins to various development systems. My supervisor called the play: “I tell you what I want, you code it up, I’ll take a look at it, and move it to test if it smells ok.” I and ten other ambitious interns were more than happy to spend the summer with what the HR guy called “javaweb.” The next three months went something like this:

Part I: Setup the environment…

SSH to abcweb01dev.company.com, head over to /opt/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, configure AJP to point to the abcapp01 and 02dev.company.com
SSH to abcapp01.dev.company.com, reinstall the Java SDK to the right version, install the proper database JARs, open /opt/tomcat/conf/context.xml with the JDBC connection pool
SSH to abcdb01dev.company.com, create a user and rights for the app server to talk to the web server
Write something simple to test everything out
Debug the environment to make sure everything works

Part II: THEN start coding…

SSH to abcweb01dev.company.com, head over to /var/www/html and work on my HTML login page for starters, other things down the road
SSH to devapp01dev.company.com, head over to /opt/tomcat/webapps/jpdwebapp/servlet, and code up my Java servlet to process my logins
Open another window, login to abcweb01dev and tail –f /var/www/access_log to see new connections being made to the web server
Open another window, login to abcapp01dev and tail –f /opt/tomcat/logs/catalina.out to see debug output from my servlet
Open another window, login to abcdevapp01 and just keep /opt/tomcat/conf/context.xml open
Open another window, login to abcdevapp01 and /opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh; sleep 5; /opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh (every time I make a change to the servlet)

(Host names and directory names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Setting up the environment was a little frustrating. And I knew that there was more to the story; some basic work, call it Part 0, to get some equipment in the datacenter, the OS installed, and IP addresses assigned. Part I, setting up the environment, is the work you would do to setup a PaaS platform. As a developer, the work in Part I was to enable me and my department to do the job in Part II – and we had a job to do – to get information to the guys in the plants who were actually manufacturing product!

So, here’s a rundown:

Part 0: servers, operating systems, patches, IPs… IaaS

Part I: middleware, configuration, basic testing… PaaS

Part II: application development

So, to me, PaaS is all about using the bits and pieces provided by IaaS, configuring them in a usable platform, delivering that platform to a developer so that they can deliver software to the business. And, hopefully the business is better off because of our software. In this case, our software helped the assembly plant identify and reduce “in-system damage” to vehicles – damage to vehicles that happens as a result of the manufacturing process.

Is the PaaS market as we know it dead?

I’ve read articles predicting the demise of PaaS altogether and others just asking the question about its future. There was a recent Networkworld article entitled “Is the PaaS market as we know it dying?” that discussed the subject. The article makes three main points, referring to 451 Research, Gartner, and other sources.

PaaS features are being swallowed up by IaaS providers
The PaaS market has settled down while the IaaS and SaaS markets have exploded
Pure-play PaaS providers may be squeezed from the market by IaaS and SaaS

I agree with point #1. The evidence is in Amazon Web Services features like autoscaling, RDS, SQS, etc. These are fantastic features but interfacing to them locks developers in to using AWS as their single IaaS provider. The IaaS market is still very active, and I think there is a lot to come even though AWS is ahead of other providers at this point. IaaS is commodity, and embedding specialized (read: PaaS) features in an otherwise IaaS system is a tool to get customers to stick around.

I disagree with point #2. The PaaS market has not settled down – it hasn’t even started yet! The spotlight has been on IaaS and SaaS because these things are relatively simple to understand, considering the recent boom in server virtualization. SaaS also used to be known as something that was provided by ASPs (Application Service Providers), so many people are already familiar with this. I think PaaS and the concepts are still finding their place.

Also disagree with point #3, the time and opportunity for pure-play PaaS providers is now. IaaS is becoming sorted out, and it is clearly a commodity item. As we highlighted earlier, solutions from PaaS providers can ride on top of IaaS. I think that PaaS will be the key to application portability amongst different IaaS providers – kind of like Java: write once, run on any JVM (kind of). As you might know, portability is one of NIST’s key characteristics of cloud computing.

Portability is key. I think PaaS will remain its own concept apart from IaaS and SaaS and that we’ll see some emergence of PaaS in 2014. Why? PaaS is the key to portable applications — once written to a PaaS platform, it can be deployed on different IaaS platforms. It’s also important to note that AWS is almost always associated with IaaS, but they have started to look a lot like a PaaS provider (I touched on this in a blog earlier this month). An application written to use AWS features like AutoScaling is great, but not very portable. Lastly, the PaaS market is ripe for innovation. Barriers to entry are low as is required startup capital (there is no need to build a datacenter to build a useful PaaS platform).

This is just my opinion on PaaS — I think the next few years will see a growing interest in PaaS, possibly even over IaaS. I’m interested in hearing what you think about PaaS, feel free to leave me a comment here, find me on twitter at @dixonjp90, or reach out to us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

To hear more from John, download his whitepaper on hybrid cloud computing or his ebook on the evolution of the corporate IT department!

applications, Big Data, BYOD, Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Public Cloud

Grading the Internet’s 2014 Tech Predictions

January 14, 2014 Journey to the Cloud

The time is here for bloggers across the internet to make their tech predictions for 2014 and beyond (we have made some ourselves around storage and cloud). In this post, a couple of our authors have weighed in to grade predictions made by others across the web.

Prioritizing Management Tool Consolidation vs. New Acquisitions

Enterprise customers will want to invest in new tools only when necessary. They should look for solutions that can address several of their needs so that they do not have to acquire multiple tools and integrate them. The ability to cover multiple areas of management (performance, configuration and availability) to support multiple technologies (e.g., application tiers) and to operate across multiple platforms (Unix, Windows, virtual) will be important criteria for enterprises to assess what management tools will work for them. (eweek)

Agree – I have been saying this for a while. If you want a new tool, get rid of 5 and consolidate and use what you have now or get one that really works. (Randy Becker)

Bigger big data spending

IDC predicts spending of more than $14 billion on big data technologies and services or 30% growth year-over-year, “as demand for big data analytics skills continues to outstrip supply.” The cloud will play a bigger role with IDC predicting a race to develop cloud-based platforms capable of streaming data in real time. There will be increased use by enterprises of externally-sourced data and applications and “data brokers will proliferate.” IDC predicts explosive growth in big data analytics services, with the number of providers to triple in three years. 2014 spending on these services will exceed $4.5 billion, growing by 21%. (Forbes)

Absolutely agree with this. Companies of all sizes are constantly looking to garner more intelligence from the data they have. Even here at GreenPages we have our own big data issues and will continue to invest in these solutions to solve our own internal business needs. (Chris Ward)

Enterprises Will Shift From Silo to Collaborative Management

In 2014, IT organizations will continue to feel increased pressure from their lines of business. Collaborative management will be a key theme, and organizations will be looking to provide a greater degree of performance visibility across their individual silo tiers to the help desk, so it is easier and faster to troubleshoot problems and identify the tier that is responsible for a problem. (eweek)

Agree – cross domain technology experts are key! (Randy Becker)

New IT Will Create New Opportunities

Mobility, bring-your-own device (BYOD) and virtual desktops will all continue to gain a foothold in the enterprise. The success of these new technologies will be closely tied to the performance that users can experience when using these technologies. Performance management will grow in importance in these areas, providing scope for innovation and new solutions in the areas of mobility management, VDI management and so on. (eweek)

Disagree – This is backwards. The business is driving change and accountability. It is not IT that creates new opportunities – it is the business demanding apps that work and perform for the people using them. (Randy Becker)

Here comes the Internet of Things

By 2020, the Internet of Things will generate 30 billion autonomously connected end points and $8.9 trillion in revenues. IDC predicts that in 2014 we will see new partnerships among IT vendors, service providers, and semiconductor vendors that will address this market. Again, China will be a key player: The average Chinese home in 2030 will have 40–50 intelligent devices/sensors, generating 200TB of data annually. (Forbes)

Totally agree with this one. Everything and everybody is eventually going to be connected. I wish I were building a new home right now because there are so many cool things you can do by having numerous household items connected. I also love it because I know that in 10 years when my daughter turns 16 that I’ll no doubt know in real-time where she is and what she is doing. However, I doubt she’ll appreciate the ‘coolness’ of that. Although very cool, this concept does introduce some very real challenges around management of all of these devices. Think about 30 billion devices connected to the net…. We might actually have to start learning about IPv6 soon… (Chris Ward)

Cloud service providers will increasingly drive the IT market

As cloud-dedicated datacenters grow in number and importance, the market for server, storage, and networking components “will increasingly be driven by cloud service providers, who have traditionally favored highly componentized and commoditized designs.” The incumbent IT hardware vendors will be forced to adopt a “cloud-first” strategy, IDC predicts. 25–30% of server shipments will go to datacenters managed by service providers, growing to 43% by 2017. (Forbes)

Not sure I agree with this one for 2014 but I do agree with it in the longer term. As more and more applications/systems get migrated to public cloud providers, that means less and less hardware/software purchased directly from end user customers and thus more consolidation at the cloud providers. This could be a catch 22 for a lot of the traditional IT vendors like HP and Dell. When’s the last time you walked into an Amazon or Google datacenter and saw racks and racks of HP or Dell gear? Probably not too recently as these providers tend to ‘roll their own’ from a hardware perspective. One thing is for sure…this will get very interesting over the next 24 to 36 months… (Chris Ward)

End-User Experience Will Determine Success

Businesses will expect IT to find problems before their users do, pinpoint the root cause of the problem and solve the problem as early as possible. IT organizations will seek solutions that will allow them to provide great user experience and productivity. (eweek)

Agree – 100% on this one. Need a good POC and Pilot that is well managed with clear goals and objectives. (Randy Becker)

Amazon (and possibly Google) to take on traditional IT suppliers

Amazon Web Services’ “avalanche of platform-as-a-service offerings for developers and higher value services for businesses” will force traditional IT suppliers to “urgently reconfigure themselves.” Google, IDC predicts, will join in the fight, as it realizes “it is at risk of being boxed out of a market where it should be vying for leadership.” (Forbes)

I agree with this one to an extent. Amazon has certainly captured a good share of the market in two categories, developers and large scale-out applications and I see them continuing to have dominance in these 2 spaces. However, anyone who thinks that customers are forklift moving traditional production business applications from the datacenter to the public cloud/Amazon should really get out in the field and talk to CIOs and IT admins as this simply isn’t happening. I’ve had numerous conversations with our own customers around this topic, and when you do the math it just doesn’t make sense in most cases – assuming the customer has an existing investment in hardware/software and some form of datacenter to house it. That said, where I have seen an uptake of Amazon and other public cloud providers is from startups or companies that are being spun out of a larger parent. Bottom line, Amazon and others will absolutely compete with traditional IT suppliers, just not in a ubiquitous manner. (Chris Ward)

The digitization of all industries

By 2018, 1/3 of share leaders in virtually all industries will be “Amazoned” by new and incumbent players. “A key to competing in these disrupted and reinvented industries,” IDC says, “will be to create industry-focused innovation platforms (like GE’s Predix) that attract and enable large communities of innovators – dozens to hundreds will emerge in the next several years.” Concomitant with this digitization of everything trend, “the IT buyer profile continues to shift to business executives. In 2014, and through 2017, IT spending by groups outside of IT departments will grow at more than 6% per year.” (Forbes)

I would have to agree with this one as well. The underlying message here is that IT spending decisions continue to shift away from IT and into the hands of the business. I have seen this happening more and more over the past couple of years and can’t help but believe it will continue in that direction at a rapid pace. (Chris Ward)

What do you think about these predictions? What about Chris and Randy’s take on them?

Download this free eBook about the evolution of the corporate IT department.

Cloud computing, Featured, IaaS, ITBM, PaaS

5 Cloud Predictions for 2014

January 3, 2014 John Dixon

By John Dixon, LogicsOne

Here are my 5 Cloud Predictions for 2014. As always, leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

1. IaaS prices will drop by at least 20%

Amazon has continued to reduce its pricing since it first launched its cloud services back in 2006. In February of last year, Amazon dropped its price for the 25^th time. By April prices dropped for the 30^th time and by the summer it was up to 37 times. Furthermore, there was a 37% drop in hourly costs for dedicated on-demand instances. Microsoft announced that they will follow AWS’s lead with regard to price cuts. I expect this trend to continue in 2014 and likely 2015. I highlight some of these price changes and the impact it will have on the market as more organizations embrace the public cloud in more detail in my eBook.

2. We’ll see signs of the shift to PaaS

Amazon is already starting to look more like a PaaS provider than an IaaS provider. Just consider pre-packaged, pre-engineered features like Auto Scaling, CloudWatch, SQS, RDS among other services. An application hosted with AWS that uses all of these features looks more like an AWS application and less like a cloud application. Using proprietary features is very convenient, but don’t forget how application portability is impacted. I expect continued innovation in the PaaS market with new providers and technology, while downward price pressures in the IaaS market remain high. Could AWS (focusing on PaaS innovation) one day source its underlying infrastructure to a pure IaaS provider? This is my prediction for the long term — large telecoms like AT&T, Verizon, BT, et al. will eventually own the IaaS market, Amazon, Google, Microsoft will focus on PaaS innovation, and use infrastructure provided by those telecoms. This of course leaves room for startup, niche PaaS providers to build something innovative and leverage quality infrastructure delivered from the telecoms. This is already happening with smaller PaaS providers. Look for signs of this continuing in 2014.

3. “The cloud” will not be regulated

Recently, there have been rumblings of regulating “the cloud” especially in Europe, and that European clouds are safer than American clouds. If we stick with the concept that cloud computing is just another way of running IT (I call it the supply chain for IT service delivery), then the same old data classification and security rules apply. Only now, if you use cloud computing concepts, the need to classify and secure your data appropriately becomes more important. An attempt to regulate cloud computing would certainly have far reaching economic impacts. This is one to watch, but I don’t expect any legislative action to happen here in 2014.

4. More organizations will look to cloud as enabling DevOps

It’s relatively easy for developers to head out to the cloud, procure needed infrastructure, and get to work quickly. When developers behave like this, they not only write code and test new products, but they become the administrators of the platforms they own (all the way from underlying code to patching the OS) — development and operations come together. This becomes a bit stickier as things move to production, but the same concept can work (see prediction #5).

5. More organizations will be increasingly interested in governance as they build a DevOps culture

As developers can quickly bypass traditional procurement processes and controls, new governance concepts will be needed. Notice how I wrote “concepts” and not “controls.” Part of the new role of the IT department is to stay a step ahead of these movements, and offer developers new ways to govern their own platforms. For example, a real time chart showing used vs. budgeted resources will influence a department’s behavior much more effectively than a cold process that ends with “You’re over budget, you need to get approval from an SVP (expected wait time: 2-8 weeks).”

The numbers pictured are fictitious. With the concept of Service Owners, the owner of collaboration services can get a view of the applications and systems that provide the service. The owner can then see how VoIP spending is a little above the others, and drill down to see where resources are being spent (on people, processes, or technology). Different ITBM applications display these charts differently, but the premise is the same – real time visibility into spend. With cloud usage in general gaining steam, it is now possible to adjust the resources allocated to these services. With this type of information available to developers, it is possible to take proactive steps to avoid compromising the budget allocated to a particular application or service. On the same token, opportunities to make informed investments in certain areas will become exposed with this information.

So there you have it, my 2014 cloud predictions. What other predictions do you have?

To hear more from John, download his eBook “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” or his Whitepaper “Cloud Management, Now“

The cloud news categorized.