Category Archives: Research

cloud infrastructure, IDC, News & Analysis, Research

Global spending on cloud infrastructure up 23% says IDC

Global Container TradeCompanies across the world are still furiously modernising their IT infrastructure to support cloud services, according to analyst IDC, which reports ‘healthy’ growth in this sector continues.

It notes that vendors of servers, storage and Ethernet switches are all experiencing declining revenues in traditional IT environments. The figures also indicate increasing confidence in public cloud services, claims IDC.

The latest Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker from IDC compiled sales figures for Q3 2015 and found a 23% rise in revenues on the same period in 2014, with total revenue of $7.6 billion being reported by manufacturers.

Infrastructure investment is growing at a faster rate than application sales, the report noted. The proportion of cloud IT infrastructure sales in the cloud industry climbed to 33.8% in 3Q15, up from 28.7% a year ago. The revenue from infrastructure sales to the private cloud sector grew by 18.8% to $2.9 billion, while sales to the public cloud rose by 25.9% to $4.6 billion.

By contrast, Q3 revenue from sales to traditional (non-cloud) IT set ups fell by 3.2% in comparison to the previous year’s third quarter, with sales of three technology segments (servers, storage and Ethernet switches) all going into decline in the non-cloud sector. However, all three technology markets showed compensating growth in the cloud sector. Strong year-over-year growth in both private and public cloud segments is reported, with server sales leading the charge in the private cloud sector, growing at 24.3%. Meanwhile, in the public cloud, sales of Ethernet switches are growing fastest of all equipment types, rising by 37.8%. Public cloud spending on storage grew 26.7% year on year.

This healthy double-digit growth in cloud IT deployments indicates an increasing preference for public cloud infrastructure according to Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Hardware and Platforms at IDC. “As public cloud offerings continue to improve in reliability and security, customers are becoming more comfortable with the flexibility they get from these these elastic environments,” said Stolarski.

Sales in Japan grew fastest in Japan at 47.1% year over year, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at 35.3%, Western Europe at 22.1%, Canada at 22.0% and the United States at 20.1%. However sales in Central and Eastern Europe fell 10%, which IDC attributed to political turmoil.

“As public cloud continues to becomes the de-facto choice for compute, users will greatly benefit from the next generation of container technology, which will enable true usage-based billing and flexible IT infrastructure that scales according to demand – rather than the fixed instances set by the provider,” commented Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts. “It’s time for public cloud to deliver the next generation of infrastructure to customers and bring utility computing to the present so customers can stop paying for capacity they’re not using.”

CA Technologies, News & Analysis, Research, UK

IT conflict in UK companies stunts growth claims DevOps study

software code devopsBritish firms are falling behind in the app economy thanks to conflict between their development and operations departments, according to a business analyst’s study. British organisations were the second worst in a European study group at harmonising their combined IT effort, with only their German counterparts proving to be less adept at DevOps.

The study was conducted by analyst Freeform Dynamics on behalf of CA Technologies. In the accompanying report Assembling the DevOps Jigsaw, the analyst concluded that UK organisations have three major failings to address. They don’t take a business-led approach to development, they lack skilled and collaborative IT resources and they are missing important control mechanisms for governing the process of DevOps.

As a consequence, the analyst says, UK organisations are at risk of falling behind in the application economy. To support the contention that companies in Europe’s two biggest economies must spend more on DevOps, DevOps supplier CA Technologies said that 84% of UK organisations agree it’s important to have IT and business alignment in relation to DevOps activities, but only 36% have this in place. While 87% of the survey group agreed that relevant IT skills must be in place, only 24% currently do so. Similarly, on the subject of having the right DevOps controls in place, 85% agree it is important but only 20% have already achieved this.

The ‘capability gap’ stems from a lack of cultural harmony in IT, according to the report. While 68% of UK organisations recognised the danger of cultural barriers between Dev and Ops teams, only 38% have fully dealt with cultural transformation. The barriers were identified as traditional lines of demarcation, ingrained mind-sets and long-established turf wars.

While only 11% of UK organisations are ‘Advanced DevOps Adopters’ in Switzerland there are twice as many (23%). Britain also lags behind Spain (13%), France and Italy (both 12%). Only Germany, with a 10% business population of Advanced DevOps Adopters, was worse than the UK in adopting a DevOps culture.

“This study reveals that UK organisations are missing out on the opportunities heralded by the application economy,” said Ritu Mahandru, VP of Solution Sales at CA Technologies, “they are failing to adopt a fluid and experimental approach to product and service development.”

The upshot, he claimed, as that digital interaction with customers, partners and suppliers suffers.

IaaS, News & Analysis, PaaS, Research, Synergy Research

Cloud market growing 28% a year and worth $110 billion says study

Money cloudCloud services boomed in 2015 as the barriers to adoption toppled and confidence surged, says a new study. Operators and vendors in the six major cloud services and infrastructure market groups earned $110 billion in the four quarters ending in September 2015, according to new data from Synergy Research Group. This represents an annual growth rate of 28% on average.

The fastest growing sectors, Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platforms as a service (PaaS) grew at almost double the average rate, however, with a 51% increase in revenues in the 12 month period. Perhaps surprisingly, the public cloud is still growing at a faster rate than the hybrid cloud, which many pundits have tipped to be the immediate future for enterprise computing as companies hedge their bets between on and off-premise computing models.

The private and hybrid cloud infrastructure service markets grew by 45%. However, spending on infrastructure hardware and software is still higher than spending on cloud services, but the gap is narrowing rapidly. The top six companies in the hybrid cloud sector were identified as Cisco, HP Enterprise (HPE), AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.

Even the lowest performing cloud sectors grew by 16%, Synergy reported.

The latest yearly figures, measured in the period from Q4 2014 to Q3 2015, showed that the total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services exceeded $60 billion. Of that $60 billion, at least $30 billion was apportioned to private cloud projects. However, spending on public cloud projects, while in the minority, is growing much more rapidly.

The investments in infrastructure by the cloud service providers brought a return, the analyst says, as the figures show it helped them to generate $20 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, private & hybrid services) and a further $27 billion from SaaS. There was also a return from additional income sources arising out of supporting internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce. A new sector is emerging, as unified communications as a service (UCaaS) began to show healthy growth and, according to Synergy, is showing signs of driving some radical changes in business communications.

Last year the cloud became mainstream and moved beyond the early adopter phase as barriers to adoption fell, according to Synergy Research Group’s Chief Analyst Jeremy Duke. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future,” said Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale.

Atlantis, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Research, software defined storage, Storage as a Service

Software defined storage and security drive cloud growth, say studies

Cloud securityData centre builders and cloud service developers are at loggerheads over their priorities, according to two new reports.

The explosive growth of modern data centres is being catalysed by new hyperconverged infrastructures and software defined storage, says one study. Meanwhile another claims that enthusiasm for cloud projects to run over this infrastructure is being suffocated by security fears.

A global study by ActualTech Media for Atlantis Computing suggests that a large majority of data centres are now using hyperconverged infrastructure (HCIS) and software defined storage (SDS) techniques in the race to built computing arenas. Of the 1,267 leaders quizzed in 53 countries, 71 per cent said they are using or considering HCIS and SDS to beef up their infrastructure. However, another study, conducted on behalf of hosting company Rackspace, found that security was the over riding concern among the parties who will use these facilities.

The Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Software-Defined Storage 2016 Survey proves there is much confusion and hype in these markets, according to Scott D. Lowe, a partner at ActualTech Media, who said there is not enough data about real-world usage available.

While 75 per cent of data centres surveyed use disk-based storage, only 44 per cent have long term plans for it in their infrastructure plans and 19 per cent will ditch it for HCIS or SDS. These decisions are motivated by the need for speed, convenience and money, according to the survey, with performance (72 per cent), high availability (68 per cent) and cost (68 per cent) as top requirements.

However, the developers of software seem to have a different set of priorities, according to the Anatomy of a Cloud Migration study conducted for Rackspace by market researcher Vanson Bourne. The verdict from this survey group – 500 business decision markers rather than technology builders – was that security will be the most important catalyst and can either speed or slow down cloud adoption.

Company security was the key consideration in the top three motives named by the survey group. The biggest identified threat the survey group wanted to eliminate was escalating IT costs, which 61 per cent of the group named. The next biggest threat they want to avert is downtime, with 50 per cent identifying a need for better resilience and disaster recovery from the cloud. Around a third (38 per cent) identified IT itself as a source of threats (such as viruses and denial of service) that they would want a cloud project to address.

“Cloud has long been associated with a loss of control over information,” said Rackspace’s Chief Security Officer Brian Kelly, “but businesses are now realising this is a misconception.”

Database, genomics research, News & Analysis, Research

Paradigm4 puts oncology in the cloud with Onco-SciDB

Digital illustration DNA structure in abstract colour backgroundBoston-based cloud database specialist Paradigm4 has launched a new system designed to speed up the process of cancer research among biopharmaceutical companies.

The new Onco-SciDB (oncology scientific database) features a graphical user interface designed for exploring data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and other relevant public.

The Onco application runs on top of the Paradigm4’s SciDB database management system devised for analysing multi-dimensional data in the cloud. The management system was built by database pioneer Michael Stonebraker in order to use the cloud for massively parallel processing and offering an elastic supply of computing resources.

A cloud-based database system gives research departments cost control and the capacity to ramp up production when needed, according to Paradigm4 CEO Marilyn Matz. “The result is that research teams spend less time curating and accessing data and more time on interactive exploration,” she said.

Currently, the bioinformatics industry lacks the requisite analytical tools and user interfaces to deal with the growing mass of molecular, image, functional, and clinical data, according to Matz. By simplifying the day-to-day challenge of working with multiple lines of evidence, Paradigm4 claims that SciDB supports clinical guidance for programmes like precision anti-cancer chemotherapy drug treatment. By making massively parallel processing possible in the cloud, it claims, it can provide sufficient affordable computing power for budget-constrained research institutes to trawl through petabytes of information and create hypotheses over the various sources of molecular, clinical and image data.

Database management system SciDB serves as the foundation for the 1000 Human Genomes Project and is used by bio-tech companies such as Novartis, Complete Genomics, Agios and Lincoln Labs. A custom version of Onco-SciDB has been beta tested at cancer research institute Foundation Medicine.

Industry veteran Stonebraker, the original creator of the Ingres and Postgres systems in 1985 that formed the basis of IBM’s Informix and EMC’s Greenplum, won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award and $1million from Google for his pioneering of database design.

News & Analysis, Research, The Bunker

Hybrid cloud proving a struggle for enterprise – research

Velostrata is the latest hybrid cloud vendor to come out of stealth

Hosting and co-location company The Bunker says the vast majority of companies are installing hybrid cloud systems but with a massive failure rate.

The Bunker’s Completing the Hybrid Cloud Puzzle, based on market research conducted by Vanson Bourne among CIOs and IT decision-makers, indicates that though hybrid clouds are overwhelmingly popular 63% of the survey struggled to execute their vision for the cloud.

Cloud migration failures were attributed to a lack of in-house skills (49%); confusing, biased or incorrect advice (44%) and alack of integration of Cloud Infrastructure and non-Cloud resources (41%).

Out of the survey group of mid-market and large corporations, ranging in size from 1000 to over 3000 employees, 90% are in the throes of creating a hybrid of cloud and on-premise computing. Meanwhile, 96% said they expect to migrate applications or data to their cloud infrastructure within the next 5 years.

It has not been easy, however, since 70% of the 94% of organisations that have already migrated applications or data to a cloud Infrastructure have experienced a failure. For some this failure was a failed or stalled project or the lack of any return on their investment. Despite many of the survey group claiming a ‘good level of engagement; for the cloud, both internally and externally, over half of respondents (54%) confessed they hadn’t got the optimum technical solution to address their needs.

The motives for adopting a cloud solution were efficiency, flexibility and scalability (identified by 60% of the group) and lower costs (40%) and the need to turn IT spending from a capital expenditure to an operational costs (which was identified by 38% of the group).

Around half (55%) of the study identified their ideal model for IT infrastructure to involved a mixture of in-house and outsourced IT infrastructure using a mix of private and public cloud.

“The business benefits of Cloud technologies may be compelling, but organisations continue to struggle when it comes to delivering on them,” said Bunker CTO Phil Bindley. The CIOs are failing to build technology systems that meet business needs, according to Bindley, but it’s not their fault. “CIOs and IT decision-makers do not appear to be getting the advice or support they need,” he said.

Gemalto, News & Analysis, Research, software, Software as a service

Software market frustrating for enterprise users says Gemalto research

Software licensing is still causing enterprises grief, according to new research by security firm Gemalto. The biggest pain points and causes of frustration are the inflexibility of licensing arrangements and the unhelpful delivery options.

According to the State of Software Monetization report, software vendors must change if they’re to satisfy enterprise user demand. This means delivering software as a service and making it accessible across multiple devices, it concludes.

The disparity between customer demand and vendor supply has been created by the shift in tastes from enterprise software customers. This is a function of the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) phenomenon, which has been partly created by intelligent device manufacturers and mobile phone makers. However, despite creating the demand for more flexibility they have not been able to follow suit and provide a matchingly flexible and adaptable licensing and packaging technique for software, the report says.

The most frequently voiced complaint, from 87% of the survey sample, was about the cost of renewing and managing licenses. Almost as many (83%) complained about the time needlessly wasted on unfriendly processes for renewing and managing licenses (83%) and the time and costs that were lost to non-product-related development (82%). Most of the survey sample (68%) said they had little idea over how the products they buy are being used in the enterprise.

Four out of five respondents believe that software needs to be future-proofed to be successful.

The report was compiled from feedback from 600 enterprise software users and 180 independent software vendors (ISVs), in relation to headaches related to software licensing and packaging.

Software consumption is changing and customers only want to pay for what they use, according to Shlomo Weiss, Senior VP for Software Monetization at Gemalto. “Delivering software, in ways that customers want to consume it, is critical for creating a user experience that sells,” said Weiss.

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Research

Cloud migrations driven by bosses, business leaders and board – report

multi cloudThe majority of cloud migrations are driven by the three Bs – bosses, board members and business leaders, as technology experts become marginalized, says a new report. However, the report also indicated  most projects end up being led by a technology-savvy third party.

Hosting vendor Rackspace’s new ‘Anatomy of a Cloud Migration’ study found that CEOs, directors and other business leaders are behind 61% of cloud migrations, rather than IT experts. Perhaps surprisingly, 37% of these laymen and laywomen see their cloud migration projects right through to completion, they told the study.

The report, which compiled feedback from a survey of 500 UK IT and business decision-makers, also revealed what’s in the cloud, why it’s there and how much IT has been moved to the cloud already. There was some good news for the technology expert, as the report also indicates that one of the biggest lessons learned was that cloud migration is not a good experience and that the majority of companies end up consulting a third-party supplier. However, in the end, nine out of ten organisations were able to report that their business goals were met, albeit only ‘to some extent’. The report was compiled for Rackspace by Vanson Bourne.

Among the 500 companies quizzed, an average of 43% of the IT estate is now in the cloud. Cost cutting was the main motive in 61% of cases.

Surprisingly, 29% of respondents said they migrated their business-critical applications first, rather than embark on a painful learning curve with a less important application. The report did not cross reference this figure with the figures for migrations led by CIOs. However, 69% of the survey said they learned lessons from their migration that will affect future projects, which almost matches the  71% of people who didn’t make a mission critical application their pilot migration project.

Other hoped-for outcomes nominated by the survey group were improvements in resilience (in 50% of cases), security (38%), agility (38%) and stabilising platforms and applications (37%).

A move to the cloud is no longer an exclusive function of the IT department, concluded Darren Norfolk, UK MD of Rackspace. “Whether business leaders understand the practicalities of a cloud migration project or not, there appears to be broad acceptance that they can do it,” he said.

Apache, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Research, Spark

Apache Spark reportedly outgrowing Hadoop as users move to cloud

cloud competition trophyApache Spark is breaking down the barriers between data scientists and engineers, making machine learning easier and is out growing Hadoop as an open source framework for cloud computing developments, a new report claims.

The 2015 Spark User Survey was conducted by Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.

Spark adoption is growing quickly because users are finding it easy to use, reliably fast, and aligned for future growth in analytics, the report claims, with 91 per cent of the survey citing performance as their reason for adoption. Other reasons given were ease of programming (77 per cent), easy deployment (71 per cent) advanced analytics (64 per cent) and the capacity for real time streaming (52 per cent).

The report, based on the findings of a survey of 1,400 respondents Spark stakeholders, claims that the number of Spark users with no Hadoop components doubled between 2014 and 2015. The study set out to identify how the data analytics and processing engine is being used by developers and organisations.

The Spark growth claim is based on the finding that 48 per cent of users are running Spark in standalone mode while 40 per cent run it on Hadoop’s YARN operating system. At present 11 per cent of users are running Spark on Apache Mesos. The survey also found that 51 per cent of respondents run Spark on a public cloud.

The number of contributors to Spark rose from 315 to 600 contributors in the last 12 months, which the report authors claim makes this the most active open source project in Big Data. Additionally, more than 200 organisations contribute code to Spark, which they claims makes it ‘one of’ the largest communities of engaged developers to date.

According to the report, Spark is being used for increasingly diverse applications, with data scientists particularly focused on machine learning, streaming and graph analysis projects. Spark was used to create streaming applications 56 per cent more frequently in 2015 than 2014. The use of advanced analytics, like MLib for machine learning and GraphX for graph processing, is becoming increasingly common, the report says.

According to the study, 41 per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as data engineers, while 22 per cent of respondents say they are data scientists. The most common languages used for open sourced based big data projects in cloud computing are Scala (used by 71 per cent of the survey), Python (58 per cent), SQL (36 per cent), Java (31 per cent) and R (18 per cent).

News & Analysis, procurement, Public Sector, Research, Sungard

Hidden cost of public sector cloud over £300m a year, says research

The UK’s public sector is spending an extra £300 million a year on maintaining cloud services and on hidden costs associated with their cloud computing projects, according to Sungard Availability Services.

The claim follows an independent study, commissioned by Sungard, that questioned 45 senior IT decision makers in the UK in public sector organisations with more than 500 employees. The average individual cloud spend of the study group, in 2014/15, was £390,000.

Sungard’s analysis of the research appears in a report, Digital by Design: Avoiding the Cloud Hangover in the UK Public Sector, which claims that unexpected costs and increasing complexity will create a ‘cloud hangover’.

The main revelation of the research is that 82 per cent UK public sector organisations (according to the study group of 45 decision makers) have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend. The average yearly cost of maintaining cloud services (among the study group) was £139,000. A further £258,000 was spent by each, over the last five years, on unforeseen costs. External maintenance costs for hardware accounted for 41 per cent of these unexpected costs, while systems integration was the other major contributor to bill shock, accounting for 30 per cent of the unbudgeted expenditure.

According to the report, 42 per cent of UK public sector organisations use the cloud to lower the work load for their ‘IT team’, while 47 per cent expect the cloud to reduce IT costs. Some 43 per cent of the public sector’s cloud customers are allegedly struggling with the costs of personnel needed to manage cloud deployments.

Roughly half (53 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations said cost savings were the key driver for adopting cloud services, but 33 per cent believe this has not been achieved. Over half (55 per cent) of all UK public sector organisations (claims the report) complain that the cloud has increased the complexity of their IT environment and 71 per cent say that cloud computing added a new set of IT challenges. Achieving interoperability between existing IT and new cloud platforms was the most frequently mentioned challenge, cited by 44 per cent of the survey group.

“There is no silver bullet for adopting cloud computing,” said Keith Tilley, executive VP of Global Sales and Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services, who called for a case by case review.