Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - General

• Demand for cloud computing continued to ramp up in 2013, with enterprise after enterprise committing to a rapid and vigorous redeployment of resources toward cloud-based solutions. Surveys of both mainstream and leading-edge users in the second quarter of 2014 suggest that another wave of investment in cloud technology is planned for the next 12 to 24 months.
• In this analysis of the survey findings we look at key drivers and inhibitors for cloud adoption, as well as workload migration patterns
• Cost is the top driver identified by both mainstream and leading-edge users
• Security and privacy are the top two inhibitors to change for both groups
• Both groups said they were aggressively moving their web presence to the cloud
• On an application level, business analytics, sales and marketing, and other back-office functions are the top three priorities for both survey groups
• Over one third of leading-edge users (42 percent) said they were using the cloud for new business and/or to run the company (35 percent).

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• Next-generation stuff like containers, Kubernetes and Mesos, and Cloud Foundry, seem like a better approach in terms of the operational experience, including going hybrid.

• A new era of computing is upon us.
• Today every discussion about changes in technology, business and society must begin with data.
• Cognitive systems are not programmed; rather, they learn, from the vast quantities of information they ingest, from their own experiences, and from their interactions with people.
• Enterprises are transforming their business and IT processes into digital services with cloud. Beyond the technology, cloud offers enterprises and institutions new possibilities for innovation, speed and flexibility.

  • This is where CloudSoft needs to shine.
• Proliferating mobile technology and the spread of social business are empowering people with knowledge, enriching them through networks and changing their expectations.

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• EMC remains the leader in traditional storage systems and has made credible forays into the new-era flash-based systems as well. But nearly a quarter ($5.1 billion) of EMC’s $23.2 billion in revenue last year came from VMware, the crown-jewel of a  federation of companies put together by EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci.
• The purported impetus of the $1 billion stake Elliott Management took in EMC  – first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal  (registration required) — is to wring more value out of the company by prying apart that federation, a plan of action that Tucci will undoubtedly fight. But while EMC, which would not comment,  is apparently not thrilled by this unwanted attention, Wall Street apparently liked what it heard about Elliott’s alleged plan which could result in EMC selling its 80 percent stake in VMware and/or its 62 percent stake in Pivotal. EMC shares closed up 5 percent to $28.33 on Monday.

• Despite all of the excitement around cloud, the majority of applications are still run on-premises. But a number of new players have entered the market with the aim of helping customers onboard existing apps into the cloud. With cloud providers only likely to gain from easier onboarding, the stage is set for potential acquisitions.
• But to enable this scalability and flexibility, the application must be coded to utilize multiple loosely coupled services, to continue to operate if a component should fail, and to act upon changes in demand and performance – the 'cloud-native' app
• Unfortunately, this is a far deviation from most legacy apps housed in enterprises' datacenters, which have been coded to be static and sturdy, and not to treat component failure as a day-to-day occurrence.
• There are issues regarding dependency on libraries and development languages, compatibility with operating systems, and security and access control
• Migrating existing apps to the cloud is complex.
• Considering this, the best option from a performance perspective is to start from scratch, either rebuilding the application to be cloud-native or taking advantage of an existing SaaS service that provides the same functionality.
• Rebuilding the application is likely to be the most expensive and time-consuming option, needing a team of developers who have cloud skills and experience – not easy to find in this day and age.
• But there is a compromise. A range of tools are now available that allow traditional on-premises applications to be assessed and even onboarded to the cloud, thereby removing much of the hassle in manually converting apps to be cloud-ready.
• Potential acquirers
• Cloud service providers: An onboarding service represents a twofold opportunity for service providers.
• SIs and consultancies
• Cloud brokers, and cloud-broker wannabes: Onboarding technology that supports multiple clouds is particularly attractive for those wishing to be cloud brokers.
• Accenture and Capgemini are looking to act as cloud brokers. Meanwhile, T-Systems has a transformation engine that can perform cross-platform migrations
• Racemi
• RiverMeadow
• RackWare
• AppZero
• CloudVelocity
• ClouDesire
• Appcara
• RISC Networks
• Cloudamize
• Krystallize
• CloudGenera

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• The 451 Cloud and IT Service Markets channel offers a detailed view and provides forecasting for the cloud and new-style IT services markets that use cloud infrastructure for service delivery. This channel offers actionable advice to market participants and enterprise users that operate service-delivery and -consumption models using the cloud globally. It provides a point of intellectual convergence for examining innovation and economics in cloud-based IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) delivery, both as externally delivered services and as a service provided by enterprise IT.

• TheInfoPro’s Market Window is a graphic representation of vendors rated and actively in use by respondents compared for effectiveness at marketing (promise) and execution (fulfillment).
• Dell consistently scores well in the product categories, especially in value for money, coming second to Cisco overall among hardware vendors, noticeably ahead of HP and IBM.
• The 451 analyst consensus is that the company going private is not an issue for most customers, but the main difference may be in how employees and partners feel about the company
• The fact it has put cloud firmly in its cross hairs suggests that the company is developing an idea of where it needs to be

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• Italian startup ClouDesire wants to 'SaaSify' existing applications with an automated on-boarding service, which can convert apps built in any dev language into deployable virtual instances for a wide range of cloud providers.
• It already provides white-labeled marketplaces to partners, and hopes its on-boarding capability attracts enough ISVs to launch a public marketplace.
• Many cloud providers
• IBM, Rackspace, OnApp and AWS offer image marketplaces
• ClouDesire has the benefit that its images can be deployed to any cloud provider
• Appcara, UShareSoft and Engenera provides similar packaging capability to ClouDesire
• Parallels, Jamcracker, Verio, AppDirect and ComputeNext offer similar technology to provide white-labeled application marketplaces
• ComputeNext
• range of cloud brokerage-enabling technologies that offer IaaS management with the ability to purchase apps,
• Gravitant, RightScale, ServiceMesh, Enstratius (Dell) and Ensim
• Cliqr

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• Cognizant's Cloud360 product portfolio is the spear tip of the company's push into multi-cloud management and brokering, providing provisioning and orchestration, monitoring and auto remediation, metering and chargeback, and analytics and advisory services.
• Cognizant's Cloud360 product portfolio is the spear tip of the company's push into multi-cloud management and brokering, providing provisioning and orchestration, monitoring and auto remediation, metering and chargeback, and analytics and advisory services.
• Xi Automation layer supports a range of clouds and a set of Managed OS services specifically for AWS users
• that are also resold by Amazon as part of its Premium services
• The key automation function in Cloud360's Hyperplatform is provided by Cognizant's own Xi Automation layer (language and APIs), which abstracts terminology, methods, and access controls from AWS, VMware, and other cloud environments to monitor and manage those environments from a single console.
• What's key here is that Xi reconciles the operations of different APIs – for example, a 'shutdown' command that means different things to different clouds has the same effect across all supported clouds when issued from Xi. It also sets up policies that can work across all clouds, such as consumption limits. Deployment and integration are supported by Cognizant managed professional services or via a self-service portal (or both).
• It allows customers to do their own scripting, but also provides integration with Chef and Puppet, as well as with Splunk, ServiceNow and BMC.
• There are some 200 staff members in the Cloud360 unit, which is funded, Cognizant says, like a startup. The CEO oversees the Cloud360 unit.
• It serves all verticals, but financial services and life sciences are currently the biggest markets. With some 52 enterprise customers (a dozen or so using the Managed OS operations and applications capability), 50% of the customer base is in the US – around 40% in Europe. It has a greater proportion of large enterprises with multi-year contracts in Europe.
• Although headquartered in New Jersey, Cognizant's heritage (and most of its workforce) is in India, where it competes with India's top IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services, as well as Infosys, Wipro and HCL.
• Looking specifically at the Cognizant Cloud360 Hyperplatform
• VMware vCloud Automation Center, RightScale, CSC ServiceMesh, Dell Enstratius and a host of small independents
• Ostrato, Gravitant, Interworks, Semperity, LTech, Apptio, Cloudyn, CloudSwitch, Cloudability, CliQr, Fedr8, CloudVertical, Nephos Technologies, AppZero, UShareSoft, ECmanaged, Novell PlateSpin, CloudVelocity, RiverMeadow and Zimory

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• CSS (Cybernet-SlashSupport) is one of a growing band of technology-support organizations that now refer to themselves as 'opex optimizing' companies. An embryonic component of its consulting and services business provides open source software and services that ease the path into the cloud.
• CSS is 12 years old, but its current structure was created in 2007, when four companies were merged into a single one. It employs around 4,500 staff and has facilities around the world, with its main delivery centers in South Jordan, Utah; Wroclaw, Poland; Melbourne; and Chennai, India.
• It breaks its client base – which it claims is 100% referenceable – into four groups
• users of networks and telecom
• platforms and systems
• packaged applications
• technology
• Cloud is but a small part of what CSS does, with around two dozen staff leading the cloud effort – with additional support from the professional-services team.
• In its CSS Labs and client projects, CSS has worked with a range of cloud providers
• Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure
• Rackspace
• SymetriQ
• VMware vCloud
• IBM Blue House
• Sun Cloud
• Salesforce
• GoGrid

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• COP is a hosted service initially, but there will be an on-premises version as well. It will also talk to legacy and other third-party clouds over time. COP will send deployment blueprints to supported resources via APIs/integrations: SaaS (e.g., salesforce.com), VMware vCHS, AWS, Azure, and client private cloud and hosting, as well as Capgemini's country-based satellite datacenter pairs and core regional datacenter pairs.
• Capgemini's SMAC technology stack (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) is a cornerstone of the company's growth strategy
• This report takes a particular look at analytics (big data) and cloud, where Capgemini has created a Dynamic Services group to house all of its cloud activities and global consulting
• However, cloud delivery and the rise of digital strategies within buy-side organizations are, by the company's own calculations, able to substitute old revenue streams.
• However, the company says the SMAC technology stack accounts for about 12% of revenue, and these higher-margin services are expected to grow at 25% Y/Y, delivering 3% revenue growth overall.
• SMAC accounted for some 33% of bookings in 2013, and Capgemini expects 40% will come from these in 2015.
• It sees SaaS as having a bigger impact on its revenue than IaaS, reckoning that about 30% of its business will come under pressure from SaaS (against 5% from IaaS) leading to a 1-2% erosion of revenue Y/Y.
• In particular, the company is bullish about the possibilities for its big-data capabilities, which represent about one-third of its SMAC-enabled pipeline.
• Capgemini set up its Dynamic Services unit in March with the intention of moving clients from legacy systems to cloud delivery. Global Consulting rolls up here as well – the unit has all of Capgemini's cloud platforms with consulting as the wrapper. (For the record, Capgemini doesn't plan to become a cloud operator itself – 'a billionaire's game,' in its book).
• Capgemini believes more than 75% of organizations have cloud-adoption strategies.
• Security, data sovereignty and lack of integration remain the key concerns, while the business is now the key buyer/sponsor of the cloud.
• Lance Friend, SVP infrastructure services, explains that this capability moves beyond the fashion for multi-sourcing best-of-breed providers to agile sourcing, which requires a service store and business-orchestration capabilities.
• The company has pre-contracted with nine or 10 cloud providers (including Skyscape in the UK).
• The Dynamic Services portfolio includes app and service stores as the delivery mechanism, a service orchestration engine, service integration, cloud services brokerage and service aggregation.
• Service orchestration is provided by the Cloud Orchestration Platform (COP), which has been under development by Capgemini and VMware and is due imminently.
• COP is based on VMware vCloud Automation Center (née DynamicOps), which is VMware's multi-cloud management centerpiece. It leverages Capgemini's integration and service aggregation, as well as VMware's Operations Management Suite and IT Business Management suite.
• COP is a hosted service initially, but there will be an on-premises version as well.
• In addition, Capgemini already offers its customers Virtustream's xStream cloud services in the US.
• In cloud-brokered services, Capgemini delivers a portal-based service store (membership access) to offer services from a master catalog
• It's a multi-tenant, single source of service provisioning. Clients can also receive a customized version of services via 'standardized' APIs
• Capgemini will package all this up as an offering to manage separate suppliers and deliver the SLA on behalf of clients
• The revenue opportunity in these kinds of deals will be on average just 13% of what Capgemini has historically been used to earning (and less than 10% of contract value); however, margins are at least 10% higher.
• The State of Texas (Department of Information Resources) is Capgemini's marquee reference customer for Dynamic Services.
• ACS is the other key service integration contractor on the deal
• Interestingly, it is Gravitant's CloudMatrix cloud broker software that is used under the hood, operating the portal from where services are accessed. Gravitant's broker portal is being supplied to the contact by General Dynamics. Capgemini has become Gravitant's largest customer as a result.
• IaaS, PaaS and Saas have turned service delivery into a very different animal from the one traditional systems integrators grew up with
• CSC (revenue decline)
• Accenture (flat revenue)
• Capgemini (just better than flat)
• Indian-heritage players TCS, HCL, Infosys and Cognizant are averaging 12-16% year-on-year growth.

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• Capgemini is unusual for a European services company, having called out the requirement to invest aggressively in developing offshore resources a decade ago, despite having a good public sector business
• As the market focuses on digital transformation services, Capgemini is in shape to capitalize on emerging customer requirements
• strong onshore consulting presence in Europe
• good-sized and growing offshore presence
• It is demonstrating more innovative approaches to service creation and delivery via its new offerings and partnerships in the 'big data,' IaaS, PaaS and SaaS areas.
• expanding capability in the US,
• In particular, Capgemini expects to win new integration business because of the requirements of SaaS and API-enabled applications, big data, and cloud brokerage and orchestration.
• However, the company says the SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) technology stack accounts for about 12% of revenue, and these high-margin services are expected to grow at 25% year on year, delivering a 3% overall revenue growth.
• It sees SaaS as having a bigger impact on its revenue than IaaS, reckoning that about 30% of its business will come under pressure from SaaS (as against 5% from IaaS), leading to a 1-2% erosion of revenue year on year.
• Accenture's Q2 results, revenue was fairly flat at 1%; CSC saw a continued decline in revenue to 5% for its recently reported fiscal year
• Western service providers are, as Hermelin indicated, struggling with this shift
• the Indian-heritage players such as TCS, HCL, Infosys and Cognizant are still experiencing revenue growth rates of 12-16% year on year, and along with their Western competitors, they are not net-native IT service businesses

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