Category Archives: Public Cloud

Deutsche Telekom, Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Deutsche Telekom aims to increase European market share with Open Telekom Cloud launch

DTDeutsche Telekom has launched Open Telekom Cloud, a new public cloud platform with Huawei as the hardware and software solution provider, in an effort to increase its market share in the European public cloud segment.

The service will offer European enterprises on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud services via an OpenStack-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution operated by T-Systems. The company ambition is to accelerate its position in the market segment, which is currently dominated by US players.

“We are adding a new, transformational cloud offering to our existing portfolio of cloud services,” said Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges at CeBIT in Hanover. “For our business customers in Europe this is an important new service to support their digitization, and a critical milestone for us in our ambition to be the leading provider of cloud services in Europe.”

“More and more customers are discovering the advantages of the public cloud. But they want a European alternative,” said Anette Bronder, Head of the T-Systems Digital Division. The move aims to capitalize on recent industry concerns over where data is being stored, as European customers are increasingly demanding that their data remain within the boundaries of the EU.

Located in Biere, Saxony-Anhalt, any data will be subject to German data protection policy, recognized as one of the most stringent globally. “Access to a scalable, inexpensive public cloud provided by a German service provider from a German data centre under German law will be very attractive to many customers in Germany” said Andreas Zilch, SVP at analyst firm Pierre Audoin Consultants. “The combination of a competitive service and German legal security represents a unique selling point right now.”

Deutsche Telekom and its subsidiary T-Systems have been offering cloud solutions since 2005. The data centre in Biere, and its twin in Madgeburg, hosts almost all of the company’s ecosystem partners, which includes the likes of Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, Salesforce, VMWare, Huawei, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Informatica.

The announcement also strengthens Huawei’s position in the European market, a long-term ambition for the Chinese tech giant. Huawei will provide hardware and software solutions, including servers, storage, networking and Cloud OS, while also the technical support for the public cloud services.

“The strategic partnership allows each party to fully play to their strengths, providing enterprises and the industry with various innovative public cloud services that are beyond those provided by over-the-top content players,” said Huawei Rotating CEO Eric Xu “At Huawei, we are confident that, with esteemed partners like Deutsche Telekom, we can turn Open Telekom Cloud into the standard of public cloud services for the industry at large.”

 

Enterprise IT, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Shadow IT

93% of enterprise now using cloud services – survey

business cloud network worldThe vast majority of IT professionals are now using at least one cloud-based service, according to a survey recently published by IT portal Spiceworks.

While 93% of respondents confirmed that they are using at least one cloud based service within their operations, the survey also highlighted IT professionals are still hesitant when considering emerging technologies.

Opportunities such as email hosting and cloud storage are increasingly being viewed as the norm, though IaaS is still met with some scepticism with only 20% of respondents currently using it, and only 16% considering its use in the next 12 months. EMEA professionals demonstrated a higher appetite for IaaS, with use 11 percentage points higher in EMEA than in North America.

In terms of current cloud services, web and email hosting are by far and away the most utilized, with 76% and 56% usage respectively. Online back-up and recovery appears to be the biggest growth area, with 35% of respondents currently using the service and 23% planning to engage over the next 12 months.

When building the business case for cloud transition, cost still remains the top priority for the majority of IT professionals. 71% of respondents highlighted this would be considered the number one reason for the transition, though cloud enabled innovation was only a driver for 3%. While early adopters are moving away from CAPEX/OPEX reductions as the business case for cloud adoption, the rising cost of hardware implementation and maintenance still drives mainstream cloud implementation.

The survey also highlighted that Shadow IT remains a challenge for a large part of the industry, as services which remain un-sanctioned by the IT team are still demonstrating high usage from the rest of the business. 33% of respondents highlighted they have deployed Dropbox services officially, but 78% of companies have employees using the service without IT approval. Google Drive was also being used in 59% of companies surveyed without approval from the IT team.

Microsoft Azure emerged as the most commonly used IaaS provider, accounting for 16%, closely followed by rival AWS at 13%. However 21% of respondents are considering Azure over the next twelve months, compared to only 11% weighing up AWS. The Microsoft team can be encouraged by these statistics, though this is a category which currently does not seem to have a clear market leader. Other brands highlighted by the survey in this space include Rackspace, Google and VMWare.

Despite AWS’s dominant market position, industry insiders questioned by BCN perceive Azure as the more effective platform. With Microsoft bolstering its ranks through strategic company and talent acquisition over the last 18-24 months, Azure is viewed as the more productive offering, despite being more expensive.

The results show a number of positive trends within the cloud industry, though still a number of worrying factors. 20% of IT services are cloud based today, and 30% of the respondents expect that within three years, more than half of their IT services will be cloud based. Conversely the culture of trusting public cloud services with company data/content without approval from the IT function seems to be a trend which isn’t disappearing.

Box, Financial Results, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Box thanks enterprise market for healthy earnings

Money financingFile sharing and content management firm Box has released its annual financials demonstrating healthy growth over the fiscal year.

Box’s focus on the enterprise market saw top-line revenues grow 40% year-on-year to $303 million, with the fourth quarter accounting for $85 million, an increase of 36% from the same period 12 months earlier.

“In the fourth quarter, we delivered strong year-over-year revenue growth of 36% and billings growth of 59%,” said Dylan Smith, Box co-founder and CFO. “These top-line results, coupled with our positive cash flow from operations, reflect our progress towards achieving positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017.”

Over the course of 2015, Box grew its strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Salesforce and IBM, as well as launching a number of new products including Box KeySafe. Last month, Box announced three new integrations with Microsoft that enable collaboration across devices and platforms. Box now supports integrations with Microsoft Office Online with real time co-authoring, Office for iOS and Outlook.com.

Building on the industry trends of mobility and security, the partnership also saw the company update its mobility offering, Box for Enterprise Mobility Management, with Microsoft Intune.

“Just as sales reps update pitches while in the field, or construction workers share the latest blueprints with their corporate team, employees access, edit and share content from mobile devices every day,” said Chris Yeh SVP, Product at Box in his blog “Box provides a solution that ensures nothing prohibits these new ways of working when a device is stolen or lost, when unsanctioned mobile apps are downloaded, or when a user attempts to access content on a jailbroken device.”

With a continued focus on the enterprise market, Box expects another strong 12 months with revenue estimated to be in the range of $390 million to $394 million, with Q1 accounting for $88 million to $89 million.

Consumer Tech, DropBox, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Dropbox celebrates 500 million users

Dropbox 500 millionJust over nine years since the launch of its file hosting service Dropbox has announced it has reached the milestone of 500 million users.

According to the company, Dropbox users have created 3.3 billion connections by sharing with each other. To date, the company’s marketing policy seems to revolve around word-of-mouth, as 44% of new accounts were opened when existing users introduced people to the service.

Founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, the early idea arose after Houston repeatedly forgot his USB flash drive. Initially a personal tool for Houston, the potential was soon realized and shortly thereafter seed funding was provided from startup fund Y Combinator.

After initially focusing on the consumer market, Dropbox officially ventured into the B2B space during 2011 and has continued to grow in recent years. Having evolved into Dropbox for Business and then adding Dropbox for Enterprise last year, the service is now used is more than 8 million businesses, with 150,000 using the premium service. Strong growth is expected to continue as 25,000 corporate customers bolster the ranks each quarter.

Dropbox still boasts a strong US following, though recent growth has come from worldwide markets. The team highlighted that 75% of users are based outside the US, with the majority of the last 100 million coming from Germany, US, India, Brazil and the UK.

While Dropbox has received substantial international growth, the brand still experiences resistance from Chinese authorities. The service was banned in the country from May 2010, with most in the community considering the censorship evidence of Dropbox’s growing international popularity and influence. The service was unblocked between February and June 2014, before being reinstated on the censored list. Today, it still remains unclear as to why Dropbox was uncensored for this period.

While user growth has continued, Dropbox has come under scrutiny in recent months following rival Box’s January 2015 IPO, which valued the company significantly lower than expected. The news has put pressure on Dropbox, whose last funding round valued it at $10 billion, though many believe the current value to be substantially lower.

Executives at Dropbox have rigorously defended its position, market capabilities and future outlook, highlighting user growth as a demonstration of market demand. Dennis Woodside recently commented to Forbes “We are continuing the scaling of the business across both consumer and enterprise.”

AsiaInfo, AWS, BSS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Telco Cloud

AWS partners with BSS vendor AsiaInfo in telco cloud move

Veris cloud coreBSS vendor AsiaInfo has announced a strategic bet on the cloud by making its Veris suite available as a pre-integrated cloud offering deployed via a partnership with Amazon Web Services, reports Telecoms.com.

The new product is called Veris Cloud Core to distinguish it from the modular, on-premise Veris Agile Core, which is the current deployment model. Apart from generally future-proofing its main product as the world moves into the cloud, Veris Cloud Core claims many of the benefits generally associated with the cloud model, including speed of deployment, flexibility and the efficiency of a SaaS commercial model.

“We are constantly exploring brand new business models, promoting industrial innovation and cross-boundary integration, and striving to build a business ecosystem powered by the Business Internet,” said AsiaInfo’s Executive Chairman Dr. Edward Tian. “This collaboration with AWS Inc. is critical and makes our vision of ‘building the Business Internet’ a reality.”

The AWS partnership is significant on a couple of fronts. The first is the precedent set by a software vendor partnering with a specific cloud provider, creating a comprehensive cloud service offering that should simplify and speed up the whole process of changing and upgrading business software. Secondly this is a major bet on the public cloud by AsiaInfo at a time when there are still many reservations around data security, reliability and control. AsiaInfo, of course, doesn’t share these concerns and thinks it’s just a matter of time before the market follows suit.

“Working with AsiaInfo underscores the importance of helping telecommunications and enterprise companies innovate in their markets by leveraging the AWS Infrastructure to deliver faster and more flexible transformation IT infrastructure,” said Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS. “By removing complexity, companies are focusing their time and resources on adding real value to their business, and to those of their customers.”

AsiaInfo is not phasing out its Agile Core offering, which it thinks will remain a good option for a lot of customers. By launching of Cloud Core in partnership with AWS the company is looking to steal a march on its competitors, who it thinks lack the same kind of out-of-the-box cloud offering. AsiaInfo is also thinking long-term; it’s only targeting a single client win this year but is betting that as everything moves into the cloud in years to come, preparing for it now will pay dividends.

The slide below summarizes AsiaInfo’s claims regarding the benefits of the cloud model over the traditional one in this context.

Veris cloud core benefits slide

Gartner, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research

Public cloud service revenue forecast to top $200 billion in 2016

GrowthThis year the global public cloud services market will grow by 16.5 per cent on last year’s total of $175 billion in sales, according to market analyst Gartner. Total sales of the various cloud services will be worth $204 billion, it forecast.

The most exciting market to be in will be infrastructure services, with its 38.5% rate of expansion making it the fastest growing cloud market. Sales of infrastructure as a service [IaaS] will create $22.4billion in revenue in 2016, according to Gartner’s forecast.

Cloud advertising is the largest segment of the global cloud services market. Though it is growing at around a third of the rate of IaaS (at 13.6%) its sales in 2016 will reach $90.3 billion. The next biggest segment is predicted to be sales of business processes (BPaaS) which will be worth $42 billion, while cloud application services (SaaS) will create $37.75 billion of revenue in 2016. Surprisingly, cloud management and security will be worth a relatively lowly figure of $6.248 billion, a figure that is possibly due to expand as the cloud industry matures.

IaaS is booming because enterprises are abandoning the idea of building their own data centres and moving their infrastructure to the public cloud, according to report author Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. However, Nag had words of warning for vendors in this area. “Certain market leaders have built a significant lead in this segment, so providers should focus on creating differentiation for success,” said Nag.

This year it will be impossible to go wrong in the public cloud as high rates of growth will be enjoyed across all markets. Gartner expects this to continue through 2017, said Nag. “This strong growth reflects a shift away from legacy IT services to cloud-based services, due to increased trend of organisations pursuing a digital business strategy,” said Nag.

451 Group, IDC, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research, Storage

Public cloud spending predicted to double by 2019 with storage booming

Cloud storageThe boom in public cloud service spending will propel AWS and Microsoft into the top five of the world’s biggest storage vendors, according to analysts.

Separate reports from IDC and the 451 Group suggest that the public cloud will growth overshadow the rest of IT and change the power balance.

The latest Public Cloud Services Spending Guide from IDC predicts that global spending on public cloud services will grow at six times the rate of the rest of the IT industry. With a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) public cloud spending will double from last year’s $70 billion to $141 billion in 2019.

The popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) will continue as it makes up two thirds of all public cloud spending in the forecast period. However Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will grow faster, with spending on each rising by 27.0% and 30.6% respectively.

By 2018, most software vendors will have fully shifted to a SaaS/PaaS code base, predicted Frank Gens, Chief Analyst at IDC. This means the software industry is at a tipping point where SaaS becomes the preferred option.

The industries with the largest public cloud services expenditures in 2015 were discrete manufacturing at $8.6 billion, followed by banking and professional services at $6.8 billion and $6.6 billion, respectively. Telecommunications will be the fastest-growing vertical industry over the 2014-2019 forecast period with a worldwide CAGR of 22.2%. Other industries expecting a five-year CAGRs of over 20% are the media, government, education, retail, transport and utilities.

“The cloud is the future of IT but every organisation’s journey to the cloud is different and won’t always result in moving to a public cloud,” said Mark Ebden, strategic consultant at Trustmarque. However, he warned that companies need to assess the functions that can be moved to the cloud with the least disruption.

The fast growth of public cloud service companies is already disrupting the storage market, according to a 451 Research study. It found that public cloud storage will account for 17% of enterprise storage spending by 2017, up from 8% today. In some verticals like retail the public cloud will account for 25% of total storage spending by 2017.

Public cloud will shift the IT budget so that more money is spent on storage, according to the report. In addition, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft will become top five storage vendors by 2017. While the traditional storage players like leader EMC can dominate now, in two years spending on traditional SAN and NAS products will be more muted, said the report. Dealing with data and storage capacity growth is by far the single greatest pain point for storage managers and improving backup and disaster recovery will be the top storage objectives for 2016, according to 451 analyst Simon Robinson.

AWS, Datacentre, Google, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

AWS, Azure and Google intensify cloud price war

AzureAs price competition intensifies among the top three cloud service providers, one analyst has warned that cloud buyers should not get drawn into a race to the bottom.

Following price cuts by AWS and Google, last week Microsoft lowered the price bar further with cuts to its Azure service. Though smaller players will struggle to compete on costs, the cloud service is a long way from an oligopoly, according to Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom.

Amazon Web Services began the bidding in early January as chief technology evangelist Jeff Barr announced the company’s 51st cloud price cut on his official AWS blog.

In January 8th Google’s Julia Ferraioli argued via a blog post that Google is now a cheaper offering (in terms of cost effectiveness) as a result of its discounting scheme. “Google is anywhere from 15 to 41% less expensive than AWS for compute resources,” said Ferraioli. The key to the latest Google lead in cost effectiveness is automatic sustained usage discounts and custom machine types that AWS can’t match, claimed Ferraioli.

Last week Microsoft’s Cloud Platform product marketing director Nicole Herskowitz announced the latest round of price competition in a company blog post announcing a 17% cut off the prices of its Dv2 Virtual Machines.

Herskowitz claimed that Microsoft offers better price performance because, unlike AWS EC2, its Azure’s Dv2 instances have include load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no extra charge.

Microsoft is also aiming to change the perception of AWS’s superiority as an infrastructure service provider. “Azure customers are using the rich set of services spanning IaaS and PaaS,” wrote Herskowitz, “today, more than half of Azure IaaS customers are benefiting by adopting higher level PaaS services.”

Price is not everything in this market warned Quocirca analyst Longbottom, an equally important side of any cloud deal is overall value. “Even though AWS, Microsoft and Google all offer high availability and there is little doubting their professionalism in putting the stack together, it doesn’t mean that these are the right platform for all workloads. They have all had downtime that shouldn’t have happened,” said Longbottom.

The level of risk the provider is willing to protect the customer from and the business and technical help they provide are still deal breakers, Longbottom said. “If you need more support, then it may well be that something like IBM SoftLayer is a better bet. If you want pre-prepared software as a service, then you need to look elsewhere. So it’s still horses for courses and these three are not the only horses in town.”

hybrid cloud, Opinion, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Simplivity

Deciding between private and public cloud

cloud computing machine learning autonomousInnovation and technological agility is now at the heart of an organization’s ability to compete.  Companies that rapidly onboard new products and delivery models gain competitive advantage, not by eliminating the risk of business unknowns, but by learning quickly, and fine-tuning based on the experience gathered.

Yet traditional IT infrastructure models hamper an organizations’ ability to deliver the innovation and agility they need to compete. Enter the cloud.

Cloud-based infrastructure is an appealing prospect to address the IT business agility gap, characterized by the following:

  1. Self-service provisioning. Aimed at reducing the time to solution delivery, cloud allows users to choose and deploy resources from a defined menu of options.
  2. Elasticity to match demand.  Pay for what you use, when you use it, and with flexible capacity.
  3. Service-driven business model.  Transparent support, billing, provisioning, etc., allows consumers to focus on the workloads rather than service delivery.

There are many benefits to this approach – often times, cloud or “infrastructure as a service” providers allow users to pay for only what they consume, when they consume it, as well as fast, flexible infrastructure deployment, and low risks related to trial and error for new solutions.

Public cloud or private cloud – which is the right option?

A cloud model can exist either on-premises, as a private cloud, or via public cloud providers.

In fact, the most common model is a mix of private and public clouds.  According to a study published in the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, enterprises are increasingly adopting a portfolio of clouds, with 82 percent reporting a multi-cloud strategy as compared to 74 percent in 2014.

With that in mind, each workload you deploy (e.g. tier-1 apps, test/dev, etc.) needs to be evaluated to see if it should stay on-premises or be moved offsite.

So what are the tradeoffs to consider when deciding between private and public cloud?  First, let’s take a look at the considerations for keeping data on-premises.

  1. Predictable performance.  When consistent performance is needed to support key business applications, on-premises IT can deliver performance and reliability within tight tolerances.
  2. Data privacy.  It’s certainly possible to lose data from a private environment, but for the most part, on-premises IT is seen as a better choice for controlling highly confidential data.
  3. Governance and control.  The private cloud can be built to guarantee compliance – country restrictions, chain of custody support, or security clearance issues.

Despite these tradeoffs, there are instances in which a public cloud model is ideal, particularly cloud bursting, where an organization experiences temporary demand spikes (seasonal influxes).  The public cloud can also offer an affordable alternative to disaster recovery and backup/archiving.

Is your “private cloud” really a cloud at all?

There are many examples of the same old legacy IT dressed up with a thin veneer of cloud paint.  The fact is, traditional IT’s complexity and inefficiency makes it unsuitable to deliver a true private cloud.

Today, hyperconverged infrastructure is one of the fastest growing segments in the $107B IT infrastructure market, in part because of its ability to enable organizations to deliver a cloud-operating model with on-premises infrastructure.

Hyperconvergence surpasses the traditional IT model by incorporating IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor onto commodity x86 “building blocks”.  For example, SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to work with any hypervi­sor on any industry-standard x86 server platform. The combined solution provides a single, shared resource pool across the entire IT stack, including built-in data efficiency and data protection, eliminating point products and inefficient siloed IT architectures.

Some of the key characteristics of this approach are:

  • Single vendor for deploying and supporting infrastructure.  Traditional IT requires users to integrate more than a dozen disparate components just to support their virtualized workloads.  This causes slow deployments, finger pointing, performance bottlenecks, and limits how it can be reused for changing workloads. Alternatively, hyperconvergence is architected as a single atomic building block, ready to be deployed when the customer unpacks the solution.
  • The ability to start small and scale out without penalty.  Hyperconvergence eliminates the need for resource allocation guesswork.  Simply start with the resources needed now, then add more, repurpose, or shut down resources with demand—all with minimal effort and cost, and no performance degradation.
  • Designed for self-service provisioning. Hyperconvergence offers the ability to create policies, provision resources, and move workloads, all at the VM-level, without worrying about the underlying physical infrastructure.  Because they are software defined, hyperconverged solutions can also integrate with orchestration and automation tools like VMware vRealize Automation and Cisco UCS Director.
  • Economics of public cloud. By converging all IT infrastructure components below the hypervisor and reducing operating expenses through simplified, VM-centric management, hyperconverged offerings deliver a cost model that closely rivals the public cloud. SimpliVity, for example, is able to deliver a cost-per-VM that is comparable to AWS, including associated operating expenses and labour costs.

It’s clear that the cloud presents a compelling vision of improved IT infrastructure, offering the agility required to support innovation, experimentation and competitive advantage.  For many enterprises, public cloud models are non-starters due to the regulatory, security, performance, and control drawbacks, for others, the public cloud or infrastructure as a service is an ideal way to quickly increase resources.

Hyperconvergence is also helping enterprises increase their business agility by offering all the cloud benefits, without added risks or uncertainty. Today technology underpins competitive advantage and organizations must choose what works best for their business and their applications, making an approach combining public cloud and private cloud built on hyperconverged infrastructure an even more viable solution.

Written by Rich Kucharski, VP Solutions Architecture, SimpliVity.

Datacentre, Europe, Hosting, News & Analysis, OVH, Public Cloud

OVH promises undeniable public cloud service in the UK

cloud exchangeEuropean hosting giant OVH has launched a public cloud service in the UK with customisable security as protection against cyber attacks becomes a major selling point alongside open systems mobility.

The service is aimed at developers, system administrators and DevOps, and promises triple data replication, hosting in European data centres and a ‘five nines’ service level agreement (SLA). The OVH Public Cloud is based on OpenStack which, says OVH, will make integrating applications, migrating to the Cloud and moving between cloud providers easier for system builders who want to keep their options open. For this reason, it will also monthly and hourly payment mechanisms so clients aren’t forced to over commit resources. Those that can make monthly payments will get a 50% discount however.

The two main offerings will be Public Cloud Instances and Public Cloud Storage.

Public Cloud Instances provides a choice between two types of virtual machines. RAM instances (starting at £25 a month) are designed for memory-hungry apps such as software as a service (SaaS), multimedia creation and managing large databases. Cloud CPU instances, at £21/month, are designed for managing processing-heavy tasks such as data analytics, computer simulations and managing peak server loads.

The Public Cloud Storage service offers high-availability object storage, to save software developers from the complications involved in setting up network file system or file transfer protocols. Classic and high-speed storage options are also available.

All the Public Cloud packages have automatic, unlimited distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection against all types and lengths of attacks, with detection and auto-mitigation and a back up service of triple data replication. All services will have access to OVH’s global fibre optic network OVH Net.

“We want UK businesses to adopt the cloud with confidence,” said Hiren Parekh, director of sales and marketing at OVH UK. “Our aim is to give users the freedom and flexibility they need as their businesses evolve.”