Cloud helps ITSM (ITWeb publicity)

The ITWeb Virtualization and Cloud Computing event in Jo’burg last week was a great success.

ITWeb published an online article highlighting our presentation’s key points…   read it here.

Mistakes made by cloud vendors… (insight #3)

David Linthicum wrote a great article on Infoworld’s Cloud Computing blog entitled “The top 5 mistakes cloud vendors make – and what you should watch for“.  It’s a long title, agreed, but its a great read – and not too long at that.

For the impatient and execs that don’t have 10 minutes to spare, here are the 5 points summarized:

1. Not focusing on API’s:  API’s are critical for adoption in the enterprise and shouldn’t be an afterthought.
2. No integration strategy:  Don’t treat integration as a bad word to be dealt with by the consultancy team.  Have a strategy that will enable customers to do it themselves.
3. Outage defensiveness:  As a service provider, don’t be naive and think you won’t ever have downtime.  And don’t go on the defensive when you do.
4. Confusing SLAs:  Lawyers tend to set these up – make sure they can talk English.
5. Spinning standards:  Don’t just talk and write about standards – make sure they’re implemented.

Looking at these points objectively, I think that David got it right.   In the same way that traditional software vendors out there are rushing to put forward their cloud computing alternatives (generally cloud-washed implementations of exactly the same stuff they sold before), both traditional software vendors and ‘pure’ cloud vendors that are making these mistakes seem to be all over the place.  The ones not making these mistakes are making huge strides into the enterprise market.

That being said – it’s easy to talk and criticize – but we’re also selling cloud computing solutions – and I have to admit that we don’t always get it right either.  But what I can say, is that when our solutions have shortcomings, we feel it our obligation to highlight these, as our integrity is more important to us than the deals we may lose by being honest.

Eassy goes live!!

Finally, the next big step forward in SA’s internet age is happening.   The East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is set to go live today, upping our international bandwidth capacity by another 1.4Tbps!

Read more here…

ITWeb – Eassy goes live today

TechCentral.com  – Seacom rival Eassy set to go live

Yeah!

Past views on network management…

I almost forgot.  Another very interesting thing I read this week was a 2008 ComputerWorld article which asked the question “What ever happened to network management?“.   Sometimes its great to look at opinions and identified trends from a few years ago and compare them to today.  I found a lot of points to be on the mark while others not so much (the same goes for comments btw), but some of the trends noted back in 2008 became like fulfilled prophesies by 2010.

I also found a conspicuous lack of cloud or SaaS terms in the article.  It’s a different story today with virtually every big and small player making a play for cloud models, but I’m not convinced that 50% of these vendors aren’t confused about what it is they’re competing for.  

Confusion in the cloud business model (Insights #2)

I find it quite interesting to see how this landscape is constantly changing…  the winds of change seem to be blowing more violently now than ever before, and there are a lot of people out there that are getting quite confused – and with good reason.

I received two news-type emails today with views that tell very different stories…   The first email from ITWeb referred to a Business World article stating that “EMC Philippines has unveiled a technology for ‘advanced virtual storage’”.   The very next email was from InfoWorld with the main article titled “Why some vendors regret becoming cloud providers“ , which talks about EMC’s regrets and why they are shutting down their Atmos  Online cloud storage service.

So who’s confused?   Everybody?

My personal opinion is that its everyone. EMC in my opinion is missing the point to an extent or don’t understand ‘the cloud’.  Sure the business model is tough and it might not make sense for a hardware vendor (or any vendor) to lose traditional business to its new cloud service offerings.  We’re face with exactly the same when our existing licensed solftware clients want to convert to SaaS solutions.

Here are a few points to consider if they don’t offer the service:

• Someone else will.  In my book, that’s lost opportunity.
• It doesn’t mean that existing customers will continue buying hardware forever (from EMC).  They may just consider alternatives at some point.
• They missing the potential parallel (backup) revenue stream – there are a lot of cloud adopters out there, and adoption is growing – fast.
• They shouldn’t be selling the same volumes ‘as a service’.  In other words: don’t sell the same volume – sell the same value!
• Cloud services may not generate the same revenue per customer in year 1, 2, 3 or 4, but by year 5 the scales start tipping.

That being said – I just need to emphasize that I don’t really understand the storage space – or the EMC Atmos model for that matter.  I’m merely commenting on the general premise of these articles that I find them both interesting and amusing that I should get these emails within 20 minutes of each other.  What these articles did do however is leave me wondering who’s not getting it – the vendors, reporters or me?

That being said – I think we might finally be coming out of the Gartner hype-cycle peak with regards to cloud computing.  People are starting to understand the value proposition as well as the long term cost implications.   Some of the vendors are starting to hit the stumbling blocks (alla EMC articles) and these are going to expose those that jumped on the bandwagon without a full understanding of what it’s all about….   Infoworld posted another worthy read that points to some of the potential shortfalls and realities of cloud computing and SaaS titled “Is the SaaS experiment finally over?”

Well, I hope you got some value from my ramblings…

Happy reading.