Over the past few months, the emergence of cloud computing has dominated most technology conversations in organisations. While we all agree that this could be a result of the buzz surrounding an emerging, possibly disruptive IT delivery model, we also see a new perspective to this. The cloud environment is perhaps the real tool that will now flatten IT, allowing even small players to compete in the market by giving them the leap they need to deliver services in a seamless manner. What could be better news?
For long the stepchild in the competitive business landscape where size makes all the difference, the day is finally dawning when the small business can compete with corporations on the operations, customer relationship management and service front. “Thanks to open platform cloud computing, it’s now easier for business people to keep up with one another in areas where they faced size and monetary disadvantages,” says Dr Sarfaraz Alam, CEO of TEXPO.
Gearing up to launch a range of cloud-enablement services, TEXPO’s research team clearly views the company’s foray into this space as a route to help customers illustrate the value of advances in computing rather than devaluing their other existing practices.
It’s perhaps the much need leap that will help smaller players enter the big world of business, being able to, at the same time differentiate themselves by continuing to deliver highly personalised services. “Thanks to cloud computing, the small organisation that has been established for many years now is able to deploy cheaply, effectively and very quickly, a solution to the problems that they had in keeping up with the large corporations. Most of the smaller companies can to get by with next to nothing as compared to the deployment of software and customer relationship management applications on premise. TEXPO sees this as a significant shift from private data centres to server-less cloud environments,” Dr Alam shares.
The cloud model’s seamless integration with the on-line world already familiar to businesses and users certainly increases its appeal. “There are many aspects of the on-line world that cloud computing has already taken over. Most social networking sites use a cloud computing program. On-line banking and bill pay is another aspect offering the ability to pay for services without ever seeing any form of hard cash,” he adds.
We agree. It’s no wonder then that leading analyst Gartner has noted cloud computing as one among the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012.Defining the cloud as a disruptive force, Gartner says that it offers the potential for broad-term impact across most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services.
According to the analyst’s estimates, enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012. On the private cloud front, IT will be challenged to bring operations and development groups closer together using “DevOps” concepts in order to approach the speed and efficiencies of public cloud service providers.
This means even more good news for the service provider market, with Gartner noting this as a shift toward the "utility" approach for noncore services, and increased investment in core functionality, often closely aligned with competitive differentiation. A worldwide Gartner survey of 1,587 respondents in 40 countries to understand general IT spending trends and spending on key initiatives such as cloud computing, found that cloud-computing services consumed from external service providers (ESPs) are estimated to be 10.2 percent of the spending on external IT services.
"The cloud market is evolving rapidly, with 39 percent of survey respondents worldwide indicating they allocated IT budget to cloud computing as a key initiative for their organisation," notes Bob Igou, research director at Gartner, adding that, "One-third of the spending on cloud computing is a continuation from the previous budget year, a further third is incremental spending that is new to the budget, and 14 percent is spending that was diverted from a different budget category in the previous year." Interestingly, forty-six percent of respondents with budget allocated to cloud computing indicated they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers.
As TEXPO gears up to deliver cloud services, our charter hinges on making our customers more aware of the cloud computing benefits because it can effectively provide the necessary technical support, the hardware, and the development tools to create what is needed. “To run essential business applications that are not supported by cloud computing, businesses have to purchase software and hardware, acquire storage units, cooling systems, power support, bandwidth, networks, and the space to house everything. Not to mention the IT personnel to provide technical support,” Dr Alam tells us.
While we see a clear benefit in what cloud computing offers businesses, this is certainly not an end to the discussion and debate that will continue to surround this disruptive force in the technology domain. However, offering new business dynamics and supporting the back-to-the basics requirement of saving money and increasing efficiency, this could certainly be a killer combination in the making. What do you think?
Gartner’s five ways to migrate applications to the cloud
Organisations seeking to move applications into the cloud have five options: rehost on infrastructure as a service (IaaS), refactor for platform as a service (PaaS), revise for IaaS or PaaS, rebuild on PaaS, or replace with software as a service (SaaS), according to Gartner. The alternative migration strategies Gartner suggests IT organisations consider are:
Rehost: i.e. redeploy applications to a different hardware environment and change the application’s infrastructure configuration. Rehosting an application without making changes to its architecture can provide a fast cloud migration solution. However, the primary advantage of IaaS, that - teams can migrate systems quickly, without modifying their architecture – can be its primary disadvantage as benefits from the cloud characteristics of the infrastructure, such as scalability, will be missed.
Refactor: i.e. run applications on a cloud provider’s infrastructure. The primary advantage is blending familiarity with innovation as “backward-compatible” PaaS means developers can reuse languages, frameworks, and containers they have invested in, thus leveraging code the organisation considers strategic. Disadvantages include missing capabilities, transitive risk, and framework lock-in. At this early stage in the PaaS market, some of the capabilities developers depend on with existing platforms can be missing from PaaS offerings.
Revise: i.e. modify or extend the existing code base to support legacy modernisation requirements, then use rehost or refactor options to deploy to cloud. This option allows organisations to optimise the application to leverage the cloud characteristics of providers' infrastructure. The downside is that kicking off a (possibly major) development project will require upfront expenses to mobilise a development team. Depending on the scale of the revision, revise is the option likely to take most time to deliver its capabilities.
Rebuild: i.e. Rebuild the solution on PaaS, discard code for an existing application and re-architect the application. Although rebuilding requires losing the familiarity of existing code and frameworks, the advantage of rebuilding an application is access to innovative features in the provider's platform. They improve developer productivity, such as tools that allow application templates and data models to be customised, metadata-driven engines, and communities that supply pre-built components. However, lock-in is the primary disadvantage so if the provider makes a pricing or technical change that the consumer cannot accept, breaches service level agreements (SLAs), or fails, the consumer is forced to switch, potentially abandoning some or all of its application assets.
Replace: i.e. discard an existing application (or set of applications) and use commercial software delivered as a service. This option avoids investment in mobilising a development team when requirements for a business function change quickly. Disadvantages can include inconsistent data semantics, data access issues, and vendor lock-in.
TEXPO Research Team
23rd December 2011
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