Clouds in general may be sleeping giants of climate change - true ?

I was listening to one of the documentaries on "Thunderheads" where a daring group of scientists tries to catch the Perfect storm across Darwin in Australia. International cloud experiment is what they call themselves. During their research they realize that clouds are indeed sleeping giants and they have ability to trap heat and reflect sunlight back into space.

So how is this related to our cloud in the whole cloud computing space? I believe that cloud computing is a sleeping giant and organizations are yet to realize the potential of the same. Once it’s unearthed it’s beyond doubt going to change the rules of Information technology. If the demand heats up will the cloud coverage change? That is the question which most of us simply don’t know but part of the answer lies with the enterprises or large organizations and cloud vendors as they are the clouds that make the cloud. Going forward it’s going to be collaboration amongst all of them which will keep the cloud sparkly.

Can public cloud dominate the Enterprise space ?

In most of the conversations what i have with my colleagues on the various cloud delivery models for enterprises, public cloud adoption seems to be the most debated. While we all agree to the fact that nothing you build internally can match the economies of scale and reach the skepticism pops up around the challenges for its adoption. Security being the primary one followed by the lack of standards and committed service levels. The debate that private cloud adoption will be the mainstream within enterprises by embracing the technology behind the public cloud i strongly believe that there is no reason why not to choose Public cloud instead. The simple reason behind the belief is that the talent tap that comes from the public cloud, the consumer base and solution variety will become irresistible for enterprises and before we see any big difference in the way it exists today adoption would have already happened.

While affordability will draw more and more minds to innovate new markets will be created and public clouds will become the mainstream reach to the end customers for enterprises. The modes of usage will be refined based on the business line but majority over the private is not so far.

Cloud Computing – Will organizations adopt to Save money ?

Organizations are pondering around the buzz word of cloud computing and technology behind the same with the de facto offer of cost savings build into the model. While new technology has been a tool to optimize and streamline the overall IT operations, its being heavily looked upon to cut costs and hence very less cutting back on the new technology uptake.

Most CIO's considers their internal IT systems to be too expensive but still considers themselves early adopters of technology. Its clear that the adoption is primarily driven with the motive to cut costs. There is a strong belief among the CIO's that cloud computing as a new technology can help them bring in a positive impact on the bottom line by bringing in a controlled outflow on recurring costs and lower upfront costs. Given the fact that cost savings are a possibility the adoption of these technology with full force is yet to happen. There was a strong reluctance due to the turbulent economic times and now with the change in the scenario adoption and switch will begin.

Innovation - Changing Paradigm, Keeps the prices on check

Innovation is rapidly being challenged in the cloud computing world. The space is still work in progress and will continue to be in the state for ever. This in fact is challenging the leading players like Microsoft, Google, Amazon to regularly update their product suits and offerings to differentiate among ts others. As these companies are throwing everything into this ring the competition is getting tougher day by day. The outcome of this is certainly benefiting the end customers who is consuming these services. The offer prices are being challenged to core and is going down to enable each of them to fight for the market share.

Cloud computing - Convergence map of conventional and cloud delivery options

Compelling reasons for Enterprises to adopt cloud computing

Enterprise IT is hunting innovative ideas to be a part of their strategy to be responsive to business to stay competitive. Over the last decade business expectations has been increasing multifold without exponential increase in the IT budget. The economic downturn has now started putting pressure on top of this to do more for less and fast. Time to value for each dollar spends along with the initial Capex and Opex is being a measure on all IT initiatives across Enterprises. Conventional ways of optimizing the existing IT systems and teams are hitting the threshold and it’s time for new innovative ways to build and deploy IT infrastructure and applications across enterprises.

Cloud computing is clearly emerging as the alternate way for a faster cost-effective and scalable way of changing IT to respond to the business needs. For those enterprise who are still considering the adoption let’s look at 3 most compelling reasons on how cloud computing can help them transform their IT.

1. Flexible pricing models – Buy versus Build.
2. Faster Time to Market
3. Take advantage of the latest technology

The flexibility in pricing models provided by the cloud computing vendors really stands out as one of the biggest reasons for enterprises to think about adoption. With the subscription based pricing models enterprises have the flexibility of starting new transformational projects with zero capital investments. These also provide options to start slow (to be risk averse) and then scale instantly or gradually based on the business needs. You have the options of winding up some of the initiatives without incurring the financial risk on the large capital investments for technology and infrastructure which you might have incurred if you were to build.

Faster time to market always keeps you ahead of the competition. The delays induced into the traditional project development lifecycle can be significantly reduced by adopting the various delivery options of cloud computing. Deploying applications across the globe is now as easy as scaling up the applications. There are wide varieties of options to get pre built application / platform / Infrastructure environments with service levels defined based on your business criticality requirements. The actual development time now can get reduced to define/customize the business logic / Data modeling and User interface.

Platform and OS sunset has been worrying the enterprises which eats up a lot of IT budget in terms of maintenance and support. The cloud computing environment takes advantage of the latest and greatest technology foundation where flexibility is built into automatic upgrades of layers without any impact, to quickly adapt to the latest technology shifts or roadmaps. The options of a subscription model to platforms and technology really takes away this burden from enterprises and helps them to focus on building application functionality to delivery more business value and leave the operations, maintenance, support upgrade etc to the cloud computing vendors.

Today’s market is highly dynamic and demands greater flexibility and agility being build into the Enterprise IT environment to support.

To Justify Microsoft Online- few thoughts?

Microsoft Online Services provide enterprises with subscription-based Microsoft-hosted online services that offer access to rich communication, collaboration, and productivity applications from anywhere. The benefits are not limited to simplified software subscription with Microsoft’s commitment on availability and security but also extend access to services rendered by Microsoft’s latest business productivity software.

Let’s have a review of the areas within your business where you gain potential by adding Microsoft online services and hence justify the investments within an enterprise.

Latest technology always – Any new technology / software launches by the technology vendors justify the overall product / platform efficiency and productivity thereby maximizing the value of investments for the adaptors. The services rendered through Microsoft online are backed by the latest and most efficient software from Microsoft’s stable thereby guaranteeing anytime anywhere secure access and seamless integration and interoperability to coexist with other business productivity applications within the enterprise. This also eliminates the need to have periodic software and service updates to stay current and more productive.

Cost – the cost advantage what can be leveraged subscribing to these services are multifold. Prima facie it helps reduce the capex (capital expenses) and opex (operational expenses) for enterprises by eliminating the need to procure / own IT infrastructure assets (hardware / Space / Software licenses) and the trained specialists resources for management. More over it brings in predictability to your monthly outflow with options to lock the price for a particular duration based on the contractual agreements.

Agility – The challenge for IT to be more agile to the business requirements can be well addressed by the model of subscribing to more when its needed rather than investing upfront based on anticipated future growth.

Secure - Backed by efficient process and huge investments from Microsoft for the Best-of-breed data centers hosting latest servers and other networking devices, they are being operated based on industry best practices. Data security standards are the maintained at the highest level for data transfer and storage from the data centers to the end point devices.

Support – Microsoft as a part of their online services guarantees support by their world class support team who are fully trained and ready to provide help and directions where even and whenever it is required.

Microsoft’s strength really lies with the depth and breadth of their partners with guaranteed delivery in case of business value of services you subscribe to or the support required post subscription. The partners are well enabled to help enterprises in choosing and developing a solution which fits to the specific requirements.

What’s next big for enterprises on cloud?

Let’s start with a very positive note on the future of Cloud computing adoption based on a recent report from Gartner. Gartner report says that business spending on software as a service (SaaS) will rise 22% in 2009 to $9.6 billion. This undeniably is a big relief to all the large cloud players and enablement community who are bullish on the service revenues projected in their business plans.

Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, said,

“The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets as tighter capital budgets in the current economic environment demand leaner alternatives … and interest for platform as a service and cloud computing grows. "
"Adoption of the on-demand deployment model has grown for nearly a decade, but its popularity has increased significantly within the last five years. Initial concerns about security response time and service availability have diminished for many organizations. As SaaS business and computing models have matured, adoption has become more widespread.”

So where is this going to come from? Are enterprises still experimenting with the cloud? While we all agree that salesfoce.com has been a huge success on the cloud within the enterprises, what could be the next big business applications on the cloud post this?

Sharon continues

“Many factors are driving adoption of SaaS, including the benefits of rapid deployment and rapid ROI, less upfront capital investment, and a decreased reliance on limited implementation resources."

The latest mandate for the CIO’s and their IT strategists is to balance the allocation of their sparse IT budget to maintain the existing IT assets and to invest in latest technologies to prepare employees with modern communication and collaboration capabilities. All new investments in IT should generate a high return on investment with predictable cost models without compromising the end user productivity. There are also thoughts of easing the existing management and operations burden of their own IT staffs for them to focus more on identifying areas of driving the business.

Given the scenario is the decision going to be simple? It is not as IT can’t afford anything which could lead to unplanned downtime or errors or compromise on the data security and compliance. But what is the way to start in the short term without any compromise and enjoy the benefits of rapid deployment and rapid ROI ?

Enterprise messaging and other business productivity suites (real time communications or the instant messaging, interactive web /video conferencing, intranet sites for document sharing and collaboration) are coming out amongst the initial choice for the enterprises. Major cloud players like Microsoft and Google have already matured offering in this space to cater to these requirements to replace the current on premises software within the enterprises performing these functions today.

These can also be integrated with other software’s /applications within the enterprises with ease and provide a streamlined experience to the end users. They also guarantee interfaces for simplified management while providing high availability and completely secure to comply with the enterprises norms and requirements.

To continue..

Evolution of enterprise IT Infrastructure..

Let’s have short preview of where IT infrastructure exists within enterprises today and how they are being managed.

It all started with the entire setup available within owned closed rooms and being called as available in premise. Most of the enterprises still consider this as the best option as they have a complete control and ownership of what they have invested in. While the smarter ones started thinking of the issues around management and operations, outsourcing evolved within the infrastructure. Initially the focus was around supplementing their own staffs from external outsourcing providers, the model evolved with ownership of staff to even Infrastructure assets being made available within the enterprises by the outsourcing providers.

A more efficient model evolved when enterprises were not able to bear the worries around the cost of owning the land, building and availability of reliable power and network. Colocated facilities helped enterprises to overcome these while benefiting from efficiencies and scale which some of the collocation providers could offer. Most of the large infrastructure outsourcing providers offers the collocation facility where even the management and operations being offered on shared services model to bring in efficiencies of scale.

Hosting was one of the Big leaps for the enterprises to completely offload their IT infrastructure asset ownership and management to other providers in this space. It even matured over the years offering different variants (Single tenant, multi tenancy) to enterprises to choose from based on the security and integration requirements and business criticality. Service levels were defined and tied to penalties to ensure availability of this infrastructure and any further sizing to address the growth of enterprises were managed efficiently by the provider.