Many organisations are moving into the cloud, especially service providers, NSPs, CSPs and suchlike, and one of the biggest challenges is how to turn that move into economic value in the shortest period of time.
Michael Miralis, senior director of the Global MSP team at CA Technologies, says it comes down to three fundamentals. “Number one is the platform you choose for your cloud strategy; secondly, the content is absolutely crucial, because consumers only come to you to consume content; and ultimately, in order for you to execute those two parts effectively, it's all about speed.”
He says speed is influenced significantly by whom an organisation partners with. “And in the absence of a partner, what I've found is a lot of service providers were lacking in a way. A lot of these guys were going to market, creating a cloud strategy, or creating a service provider strategy, but really hadn't thought about how to go to market.”
What Miralis found in many cases is that businesses would find someone who has a strong technical background as well as a sales background. However, he says there are so many elements that need to come into play when developing a cloud strategy. “You have to get into everything from demand generation, to marketing, to development, to how am I going to train the sales force, etc.
“Bringing that all together is not necessarily something for a company to consume in a short period of time. In order to accelerate the process, it's all about whom you partner with. In a nutshell, it's platform, content and choosing the right partner.”
Applications
In terms of applications, he says, companies need to look at what is core to the business, and what is non-essential. “Business need to find what is core, and then figure out how to source those applications from a service provider. Really, services are about applications that are not necessarily core to the business, but are critical to the business on another level. Applications such as network monitoring, security and service desk are vital to managing your business, but not core to your top-line business as it were.
“So why do I need to buy these technologies, own them, skill them, when I can consume them off a service provider?” asks Miralis. “The opportunity is, define what are the services my customer base requires, depending on how you segment your customers, or what your target market is, what are they prepared to pay for, what are they prepared to consume? There are different pain points for different industries. Now it's a question of how do you bring them to market in a speedy fashion, at the correct price point and so on.”
For an enterprise and government, it's all about reducing costs. “The one thing I would flag though is enterprises aren't going to move mission-critical applications to a public cloud. They are looking to reduce their costs by leveraging cloud-based services, in terms of infrastructure, and then putting applications on top that perform in a different way and reduce cost.”
He cites CA's AppLogic platform as a good example. AppLogic is a cloud platform that offers fast and efficient delivery of business services via a SaaS-based model. It works by virtualising hardware and software grid components, which become accessible via a catalogue of virtual appliances. The appliances are then dragged and dropped onto the grid in the working GUI. Components are networked together in the system as the user draws lines. Defaults for memory, bandwidth and CPU are set along with minimums and maximums for automatic scaling.
CA says once the application is launched, users can log into the application remotely to make changes. Users can also migrate or replicate the application quickly and easily.
The technology allows users to provide quick and efficient delivery of new services using existing operating systems, middleware and applications. They can also lower hardware costs by using commodity x86 servers, common switches and other hardware, and can increase efficiency with flexible storage options, including NAS, SAN and virtual SAN.
Cloud is about the consumption of services; those services are represented by the application. Historically, CA has been about servers, but as it's now all about consuming services, why bother with servers? Why replace a machine for $5 000 when you can probably get away with a machine that costs $1 000? asks Miralis.
“But from my experience, we're working with service providers who are in the black within six to nine months. Most people want to make their return on investment at least within 12 months. It's also a result of breadth of portfolio and depth of service that you're providing,” he concludes.
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