CCi Issue 19

Issue 19

Cloud Computing Intelligence

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ISSUE 19

From the editor EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Marcus Austin, t. +44 (0) 7973 511045 ma@cloudcomputingintelligence.com

Welcome to CCi Issue 19 T

he start of 2015 has been an eventful time with many of the world’s biggest businesses such as SAP, IBM and Microsoft announcing that revenues are down. However if you scratch below the surface you find that the cloud and cloud-related parts of the businesses are exceeding all benchmarks.

While revenues from their traditional boxed and licenced products are carrying on a downwards spiral, the revenues for cloud are starting to make up for the ‘conventional’ IT losses.

The figures for IBM and Microsoft show double digit and even triple digit increases in revenue around cloud and although the revenues from cloud are still small compared to the ‘traditional’ revenues, there’s every chance that those revenues are heading to exceed and out do offline revenues in the next 3-5 years.

That’s if they aren’t beaten to the market by the cloud pure-plays; thanks to the ability of cloud to start small and grow big, without the need to build vast server farms or to invest in large IT

teams with over-priced skills, there are more and more pure-plays on the way to challenge the big players.

To celebrate these new kids on the block we’re working with the CloudEthernet Foundation on the Clouded Leopards’ Den, a competition aimed at celebrating and encouraging cloud entrepreneurs and cloud start-ups.

Unfortunately you’ve missed the cutoff date for this year but if you look at the website http://www.cloudethernet. org/cld/ you can see more on the next generation of cloud businesses. And while it’s still probably going to be a few years before they become the next Microsoft or IBM, whatever happens, it’s going to be an interesting time ahead.

Lastly you may have noticed a few more names on the CCi banners. We’d like to welcome our newest writers including IT industry veteran David Tebbutt and Graham Jarvis.

Marcus Austin Editorial Director, CCI Magazine

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Scott Colman, t. +44 (0)7595 023 460 e: scott@futurepublishingsolutions.com GROUP ADVERTISING MANAGER Nic Catterall, t. +44 (0)7730 762 136 e. nic@futurepublishingsolutions.com ADVERTISING SALES Stuart Mace, t.+44 (0)7827 912 603 e. stuart@futurepublishingsolutions.com WEB & DIGITAL Apal Goel, t. +91 (0)97 171 6733 e. apal@futurepublishingsolutions.com CIRCULATION & FINANCE MANAGER Emma Colman, t. +44 (0)7720 595 845 e. emma@futurepublishingsolutions.com DESIGN & PRODUCTION Jo Ross, t. +44 (0)7740 468 667 e. jo@futurepublishingsolutions.com Editorial: All submissions will be handled with reasonable care, but the publisher assumes no responsibility for safety of artwork, photographs, or manuscripts. Every precaution is taken to ensure accuracy, but the publisher cannot accept responsibility for the accuracy of information supplied herein or for any opinion expressed.

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Cloud Computing Intelligence (CCi) Magazine is published 10 times in 2014 by Future Publishing Solutions Ltd, and is a registered trademark and service mark of Future Publishing Solutions Copyright 2014. Future Publishing Solutions Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without prior permission in writing from the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act (UK) 1988, or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licencing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK. Applications for the copyright owner’s permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be forwarded in writing to Permissions Department, Future Publishing Solutions Ltd, Lea Green Farm, Lea Green Lane, Church Minshull, Nantwich, Cheshire, CW5 6ED. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.

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ISSUE 19

Contents

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30 38 18 News

6-16 News

20

Featured

24 42

33

18 Introduction to Boston Limited 20 Matching the right people

to the job 24 Why is hybrid cloud the

way forward 30 Making the most of the

networked economy 33 A focus on european data

protection reforms 38 The future is hybrid IT 42 The age of ‘appification’

DUBLIN LONDON

AMSTERDAM

PARIS

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News

ISSUE 19

EMC goes hyper converged E MC has launched a new hyperconverged infrastructure appliance designed to make it easier for businesses to create managed, flexible and agile on premise cloud-like solutions.

There’s a growing trend for delivering ‘cloud in a box’ type solutions and the latest is the EMC VSPEX BLUE, a storage, networking and compute appliance that comes pre-configured and allows users to spin up virtual machines quickly.

EMC claims one of the key features of the new appliance is its ability to produce fast returns on investment, and claims the appliance enables users to go from power-on to provisioning virtual machines in under 15 minutes, and additionally through direct links to EMC CloudArray has a scale-out infrastructure

that allows businesses to meet changing demands, quickly and is supported and managed remotely.

Essentially the VSPEX BLUE is a VMware EVO:RAIL based device with additional EMC software to handle storage, and an EMC management layer which includes a dedicated marketplace of pre-configured software solutions.

The management layer extends the capabilities of the native EVO:RAIL Deployment, Configuration and Management (DCM) Engine, and adds patch and software updates notification – updates can be installed automatically without interruption or downtime so that the appliance software is always up-to-date – and a one-stop EMC and third-party app market, as well as

other electronic services, such as EMC knowledge base articles.

Applications in the first release of the VSPEX BLUE Market include prevalidated versions of EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, VMware vSphere Data Protection, and access to additional hybrid cloud storage via the EMC CloudArray Gateway.

The basic VSPEX BLUE is available from Feb 17 and comprises common modular building blocks with one to four 2U/4-nodes and is available through EMC’s distributor partners including Arrow, Avnet, Networld, TD Azlan and Tech Data W. www.emc.com

EU to help solve the fear of the cloud

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new EU funded project is aimed at helping the public sector IT departments to overcome the fear of the cloud.

The benefits of cloud adoption are widely recognised within Europe’s public sector, however despite this awareness adoption is still years behind the private sector.

In order to speed the take up of cloud in the UK and Europe the European Commission has created a pilot project entitled a ‘Cloud Approach for Innovation in Public Services’ (CLIPS). The project is funded by the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework (CIP) Programme of the European Commission, and aims to get

more public sector organisations on to the cloud.

To achieve this task the project plans work with businesses and the public sector to create a dedicated framework for cloud based public services that address three principal sectors, architecture, design and security. The frameworks will then be tested with five pilots in five cities: Stockport (UK), Bremerhaven (Germany), Lecce (Italy), Santander (Spain) and Novi Sad (Serbia).

The tests will centre around some fictional examples that combine the public-sector, business and citizens for example a family moving from one member state to another and

the typical complexities that such a move could entail. Taking into account administrative requirements such as registering for utilities, schooling, local taxes, social care, all through the use of use of a dedicated cloud based infrastructure.

The pilots are expected to last 30 months and following the hopefully successful trials will result in the delivery of a common platform with interoperable services, transferable methodology and associated business models that will be adopted by cloud based public services throughout the EU. W. www.clips-project.eu

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News

ISSUE 19

Microsoft reveals its cloud roadmap T he Cloud Platform Roadmap Site from Microsoft gives a view of where Azure and it’s cloud services will be in the coming years.

Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise Marketing group Takeshi Numoto has laid out the plans for Microsoft’s cloud roadmap including details of cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Intune, Power BI, and Visual Studio Online; server offerings such as Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server and Visual Studio; and converged system appliance offerings such as Cloud Platform System, Analytics Platform System and StorSimple.

Explaining the reasoning behind launching access to the Microsoft roadmap Takeshi explains “One area where we strive to set ourselves apart from the rest of the industry is in being transparent so you can make the best possible strategic technology decisions.” Which is Microsoft’s way of saying, ‘Google and AWS won’t tell you where they’re going to be next week but we are.’ And all credit to them. If you’re building applications to build a business on then you need some longterm reassurance and that’s one area that AWS and Google are currently missing.

The roadmap will appear on

the Cloud Platform roadmap site, and as Takeshi details will show where Microsoft is focussing their development efforts and explains what technology is currently in development and coming within the next few months.

“We believe this site is an important step on that journey. As the site grows and matures, we’ll look forward to your feedback on what is working and where we can improve, to ensure this resource is a valuable asset for your business.”

W. www.microsoft.com/ cloudplatformroadmap

Cloud reached a tipping point in 2014

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he use of cloud in enterprises reached a tipping point in 2014 as businesses went all out in their move to the cloud claims IBM, with many businesses including Whatsapp building their entire infrastructure on SoftLayer’s bare metal servers At an open day at IBM’s SoftLayer data centre in London, Doug Clark the businesses Cloud Leader in the UK and Ireland said cloud computing has now reached a “tipping point” as enterprises made a concerted effort to move their new and established workloads to the cloud.

Clark, said that towards the end of 2014 he saw a move by customers to cloud. “We’ve definitely reached a tipping point for cloud with clients. They have dabbled in the past and have done a few applications in the cloud, but now they

are taking a strategic direction to go all in on the cloud,” he said.

He also said that the drivers for this move to cloud were an unmet need in the rest of the market for IBM’s Dynamic Hybrid Cloud solutions and bare metal servers something he identified as “massively important” and why their clients were talking to IBM and “not the competitors.”

Additionally Clark also pointed out that enterprises also realised that IBM had the right mix of infrastructure and skills to help businesses with the “baggage and applications that need to be very carefully manipulated and moved into cloud.”

While much of the drive to cloud was from the c-suite level, Clark also pointed that many of the key purchasers of cloud were in the growing development

community. “Evans research shows a developer community of 18.2 million and a quarter are developing on cloud and we think that will grow to 26 million; everything starts in the hands or on the screen of a developer and they are very important to us.”

Marc Jones CTO SoftLayer called the new move to cloud as “foundational “ for both SoftLayer and IBM with much of IBM’s SaaS portfolio being run from SoftLayer or “being moved to it.” Jones also revealed that Whatsapp runs entirely on SoftLayer bare metal servers with SoftLayer providing infrastructure for Fitbit, Tumblr, Dropbox, Samsung, Citrix, Repsol as well as big data solutions from Basho, MongoDB, Riak CS, Cloudera and IBM’s recently purchased Cloudant W. www.softlayer.com

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IT is moving away from proprietary to open source

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usinesses are moving away from proprietary software to open source because of the increased levels of code transparency and better business continuity, quality and control Five years ago you would have had to be mad or incredibly far-sighted to be using open source software, particularly if you were working in IT in a medium to large business. These days everything has been turned on its head, and you’re now in the minority if you use nothing but proprietary systems in your business.

But it’s not just us who thinks this. According to a new study “The Open Source Collaboration Study:

Viewpoints on Security and Privacy in the US and EMEA” by the Ponemon Institute and Zimbra, more than 75% of IT professionals agree that the code transparency inherited from using open source software increases the trustworthiness of a software application. And, two-thirds believe it improves security and reduces privacy risks.

Findings from the survey, which was conducted in 18 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as the United States, show that 67% of IT professionals in EMEA and 74% in the US agree that commercial open source outperforms proprietary software when it comes to business continuity.

Additionally the majority of businesses (60%) in EMEA believe commercial open source software will boost quality and 57% agree that it offers greater control compared to proprietary software.

When asked what motivated them to switch to open source those questioned sighted business continuity, quality and control above cost as the reasons for moving to open source, additionally they also found that open source solutions outperformed proprietary software across all attributes.

W. info.zimbra.com/zimbraponemon-survey-en

HyperCatCity develops opens standards for IoT

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he UK’s HyperCatCity protocol is intended to do for cities and the internet of things (IoT) what the HTML web standard did for the internet The new HyperCatCity (HCC) Internet of Things (IoT) standard is intended to make the sharing of IoT data easy between cities and between third parties, so anyone can access and use the vast amount of data our cities create, and that’s an amount that’s set to get bigger and bigger.

Figures show that cities are currently growing by 1.3 million people per week, and by 2050 three quarters of the world’s nine billion population will live in urban areas. Those urban areas are mostly new build, and will

involve an area the size of Australia to be concreted over with an immense infrastructure to help those 6.75 billion to live and work.

According to Andrew Collinge, Assistant Director of the Greater London Authority and the London Datastore HCC will be central to the £1.3 trillion of infrastructure spending expected to be made in the UK alone.

It’s also a market that according to a 2013 BIS research paper is estimated to be worth some $408 billion (£270 billion) per year by 2020.

So what’s it going to be used for?

This of course is the big question.

In Milton Keynes they’re going to be encouraging taxi users to register their

phones so they can track journeys, not only for the routes and time they take, but also to record the bumps from potholes and then coordinate that with maintenance work.

In Bristol they’re going to launch a truly innovative scheme that will launch the world’s first city wide Software Defined Network and produce an “open programmable city.” Elsewhere they’re using the IoT behind the smart cities to tell refuse trucks when they need to empty bins, make parking easier and create revenue for the councils by getting third-parties to monetise the data they own.

W. www.hypercat.io

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Businesses failing to delete corporate data

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new survey finds businesses are failing to delete data as employees leave and employees aren’t afraid to access sensitive data after they’ve left and are willing to sell passwords for as little as £100.

SailPoint’s 7th Annual Market Pulse Survey has uncovered a worldwide indifference to towards protecting sensitive corporate data from both the employer and employee side The survey found businesses worldwide are failing to delete data from easily accessible cloud applications after employees have left the company. More than three out of five (61%) in the UK admitting they still had access to corporate data after they had left the business rising to 69% in the US and 70% in Germany and France.

Having corporate data available to ex-employees is bad, and the numbers are shocking, however luckily the number of ex-employees who would then access that data

is thankfully small, just over one in four in the UK (26%) would entertain the idea of using corporate date after they’ve left with 27% doing the same in the US. Sailpoint also found the usage of cloud apps without the IT department’s knowledge is rife, with almost one in four (24%) employees in the US using a cloud app without permission, followed by the UK at 21%. When asked about corporate policies on cloud apps worryingly less than a third (30%) in the UK said corporate policies closely monitored the use of cloud apps using mission critical data, with just 60% aware of a corporate policy related to corporate data theft.

Additionally the survey also found that the majority (70%) of employees are now using mobile devices for work and in the UK 67% access corporate data from those devices – slightly more than the considered enlightened US, but way less than Denmark with three out of four (75%) respondents

grabbing corporate data on their smartphones.

When asked about passwords an alarming number of employees surveyed admitted they would sell their passwords, some for as little as £100.

In addition to blatant sabotage, the survey also confirmed that employees are lax about password management in general.

Specifically, one in five employees routinely share login information for corporate applications with other members of their team, which increases the potential that the passwords they sell might not even be their own.

Compounding the problem, more than half (56%) of the of respondents admitted to some level of daily password reuse for the corporate applications they access, with many as 14% of employees using the same password across all applications.

W. www.sailpoint.com /2014MarketPulseSurvey

NetSuite sees the fifth year of revenue growth

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ure-play cloud business NetSuite has had its fifth year of double digit growth with half a billion dollars annual revenue Cloud-based financial and ERP business NetSuite has announced its Q4 and year end revenues for 2014 and revenue figures are up however despite the growing revenues the businesses losses were also up.

NetSuite reported total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2014 was $157.9 million, representing a 37% increase over 2013, with total revenue for the year at just over half a billion ($556.3), a year-over-year increase of 34%.

While revenues for the quarter and year are up, profits are still not there. On a GAAP basis, net loss for the fourth quarter of 2014 was $25.3 million, and the total loss for the 2014 was an exact $100 million, that’s $29.6 million more than the $70.4 million loss in 2013, a rise of 42%.

Explaining the figures NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson said. “The fourth quarter of 2014 was our seventh consecutive quarter of more than 30% year-over-year recurring revenue growth. In addition, fiscal year 2014 represents a fifth consecutive year of accelerating recurring revenue

growth, which, based on public disclosures, we believe is a record unmatched by any publicly-traded on-premise or cloud software company during the last five years.”

Nelson also highlighted how the results compared to its on premise competitors (SAP and IBM) who had miserable Q4 results. “Our record results for the quarter and fiscal year 2014 contrast with the results announced by legacy on-premise software companies as the cloud and NetSuite disrupt the business software landscape.”

W. www.netsuite.com

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EU data protection law by end 2015

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he EU wants a Digital Single Market as soon as possible and is intending on pushing through the EU Data Protection Reform by the end of 2015 to reach that goal.

In a joint statement by EU Vice President Andrus Ansip and Commissioner Věra Jourová, both bureaucrats said they would like the EU Data Protection Reform, which have been on the drawing board for the last three years, to be made law by the end of 2015.

The new law if it’s passed will create a general EU framework for data protection and includes directives on protecting personal data processed for the purposes of prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal offences and related judicial activities.

As the statement says the recent terrorist attacks have made the latter part of the new reform particularly

relevant “This is very timely, not least in light of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. There is need to continue and to intensify our law enforcement cooperation. Robust data protection rules will foster more effective cooperation based on mutual trust.”

The intention of the 2010 reform was to take the outdated data protection laws, designed and put through in 1995 - unfortunately way before the Internet had really taken off - and to bring it in to the 21st Century.

The benefits for businesses in the new reform are around three main innovations: One continent, one law: A single, pan-European law for data protection, replacing the current inconsistent patchwork of national laws with benefits estimated at €2.3 billion per year.

One-stop-shop: Businesses will only have to deal with one single

supervisory authority, not 28, making it simpler and cheaper for them to do business in the EU. The same rules for all companies – regardless of their establishment: Businesses based outside of Europe will have to apply the same strict rules as those inside the EU, creating a level-playing field.

Currently the reform is going through the dotting I’s and crossing t’s period. The reform was voted through with an overwhelming majority last March, however while the Council of the EU is making considerable progress, the Ministers in the Justice Council still need to work on finalising the agreement on the Regulation and “make progress on the ‘police’ Directive” within 2015, and at the moment they hope that will be achieved by June 2015.

W. www.sailpoint. com/2014MarketPulseSurvey

DevOps becoming prevalent in enterprise

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new study shows enterprises are catching up with their small midsize counterparts when it comes to developing with the DevOps methodologies The results of a Rackspace survey that looked at the utilisation of the DevOps methodology in businesses of all sizes across the UK, US and Australia, found a surprising take up of the methodology in larger enterprises than would be expected.

Challenging the reputation that they are slow to respond to industry developments, nearly two thirds (63%) of the UK enterprises were actually familiar with the concept of DevOps, catching up with midsize businesses where just under three quarters (73%) were familiar

with the concept. Nearly four in ten (38%) of those at large organisations have actually implemented DevOps practices, just behind smaller businesses where 42% had.

However, the way in which the two groups use DevOps differs. UK enterprises have been mainly focused on application monitoring (50%) and production support (50%) while just under a third (30%) fully integrated their development team with their operations team (compared to 41% midsize businesses). This suggests that although the understanding within enterprises of what DevOps is looks healthy, this is not reflected in the activities they are prioritising such as better monitoring which does not tackle the full scope of

DevOps challenges.

These findings show that although the understanding within enterprises of what DevOps is looks healthy, this is not reflected in the activities they are prioritising such as better monitoring which does not tackle the full scope of DevOps challenges. Whilst enterprises are making a good start towards DevOps, it will seemingly take more time for the improving understanding of the concept to build improved bridges between developers and operations, rather than merely triggering more advanced automation and monitoring.

W. www.rackspace.co.uk

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SAP unveils new Business Suite 4 based on SAP HANA

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usiness Suite 4 has been completely reimagined with versions for cloud, on-premise and hybrid cloud development ERP business SAP has launched the next generation of their SAP Business Suite or to give it the full name SAP S/4HANA. It’s a significant redesign and is based on its real-time in-memory platform, SAP HANA along with design principles taken from the SAP Fiori user experience (UX) for mobile devices.

SAP describe the new software as “completely reimagined” and will offer cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment options with all solutions using the in-memory and real-time

capabilities of SAP HANA. SAP S/4HANA will also expand the SAP portfolio of cloud solutions such as those from SAP companies Ariba, Fieldglass and SuccessFactors and is intended to help businesses make the transition to the cloud while keeping all the integration of their existing SAP solutions.

The new suite is aimed at the same market as their current range of products but also has an eye on those looking at solutions for the Internet of Things and Big Data and has been road tested via the SAP Simple Finance solution, announced in June 2014, which used some of the SAP S/4HANA

technologies.

As way of helping customers move to the new cloud technologies SAP has announced path for customers to move to SAP S/4HANA with “pre-defined migration and deployment packages for quick time to value”.

Speaking at the launch Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP said SAP’s Business Suite had been “reinvented for the digital age”, and was there as an innovation platform designed to drive the growth of businesses that needed “to enter new markets and engage with their consumers in any channel.”

W. www.sap.com

VCE converged solution for hybrid cloud

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he latest hybrid cloud VCE Solution adds factory Integration and one-call support for VMware NSX, VMware vRealize Cloud Management and EMC ViPR The VCE “Foundation for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud,” is a new integrated solution designed for the deployment and management of hybrid cloud environments, and is one of the first devices to come out of the business since EMC announced it would be taking the lead role in the business.

In October 2014, VCE – the joint venture of VMware, Cisco, and EMC – announced that EMC had acquired

controlling interest in the company.

The idea behind the move was to allow VCE to move faster and be more nimble without the overhead of having three parent companies.

The new device aims to bring together the speed and agility of a public cloud with all the control and security of a private cloud and it does this by coming pre-configured and ready to go with a number of pre-installed hybrid specific features including; including VMware NSX (network virtualisation), VMware vRealize (management and orchestration), and EMC ViPR (software defined storage).

The Foundation for Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud will be orderable in Q1 2015 through VCE and its partners. While the devices ticks all the requirements that businesses need with a hybrid cloud out- of-thebox solution, it will be interesting to see how it fairs against what is now a very competitive sector, where the majority of the competition is fuelled by the businesses founders, including VMware EVO:RAIL solutions from the likes of Dell and HP and EMC’s own recently announced VSPEX BLUE. W. www.vce.com

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ISSUE 19

Spotlight: Boston Limited

Introduction to Boston limited Boston Limited Web address – www.boston.co.uk Headquarters based – St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK Year started – 1992 Cloud solutions provided – Compute and Storage solutions for use in-house (Private), externally (Trusted) or for provisioning of on-demand computing infrastructure (Hybrid).

Locations – UK, US, Germany, India Tel: +44 (0) 1727 876 100 Email: info@boston.co.uk

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ince 1992 it has been the managing director Manoj Nayee’s vision to provide first-to-market technology to a diverse client base. It has been this mantra that has led to Boston Limited excelling in all its activities, with a dedication to helping its partners succeed, they strive to always provide award winning, tailored solutions that are customised to fit their customers exact specifications.

It was in 1994 that Boston became the first company to bring Silicon Valley-based Supermicro computer to Europe, reselling their high-performance, energy efficient motherboards, chassis and server systems. Since then Boston has become one of Supermicro’s most respected technology partners and a world renowned systems integrator, designing their own award winning range of server, storage and workstation solutions.

In the year 2000 Boston began to develop their own range of high performance server, storage and workstation solutions at its headquarters in St Albans, UK. It was only two years later in 2002 when Boston opened its worldclass labs facility – Boston Labs, giving their resellers and customers the ability to test the latest products and technologies first-hand.

Following on from their success in the UK and Europe that in 2009, Boston Limited started to expand globally. Firstly into India, with offices opening in Mumbai and Bangalore, and only a year later in 2010 Boston launched operations in Munich, Germany. Facilities also opened on the West and East coast of the United States the following year, servicing

the U.S. and the Americas.

During that time, Boston has won many awards and received accolade from the industry for many of its successful product lines. One year after launch the Boston Virdis™ ultra-dense ARM® based microserver went on to win the Green IT ‘One to Watch’ award , and then within another year, in 2014 the Boston Igloo storage range was awarded the Editor’s Choice ‘laboratory tested product of the year’ award at the 11th annual storage awards.

Since its founding Boston Limited has always strived to stay ahead of the competition and has achieved this by offering a mix of benefits that include tailor-made solutions from the specification to a unique design. Boston has the knowledge and experience to tailor the ideal solution for customers and has the ability to deliver with a large global stock-holding, efficient supply chain and a close relation with vendors that is unrivalled by the competition. Last but by no means least, Boston Limited offers the leadingedge in technology with engineers dedicated to assessing new technologies in Boston’s R&D labs facility, through this Boston is able to offer new technology first.

“At Boston we pride ourselves on building strong partner relationships with the industry’s most renowned companies, ensuring we always provide our clients with first-tomarket technology and award winning solutions. Through collaborations we are able utilise skills and knowledge to ensure our tailor-made solutions are at the highest level.” – Manoj Nayee, Managing Director – Boston Ltd

Cloud computing has existed for more than a decade now. The best practices are well established and openly discussed. The practical operational experience of leading cloud platform operators makes it clear that best in class performance, reliability and economy of operation depend on adopting an architecture that permits large scale replication and automation.

Boston Limited brings the power of the Cloud to the enterprise with their range of fully integrated, high performance Cloud-based solutions. Boston offer Compute and Storage options that are compatible with current applications and are designed to coexist with existing I.T. infrastructure; enabling you to move faster, respond quicker and accelerate innovation.

Boston have developed a range of offerings to answer your cloud based compute and storage needs whether this is for use in-house (Private), externally (Trusted) or for provisioning of on-demand computing infrastructure (Hybrid).

The cloud can eliminate many of the complex constraints from the traditional computing environment, including space, time, power and cost.

Boston offers a comprehensive range of private cloud solutions to suit your business’ changing demands over time.

With a “pay-as-you-use” or “corebanking” model, you can rent or charge for compute and storage power using a real-time billing engine.

Boston Limited offer a wide and competitive range of cloud solutions including the innovative MicroCloud™ which is a high-density, multi-node UP server with 8/16 hot-pluggable nodes and 16 hot-swappable HDDs in a compact 3U form factor. Each independent node supports an Intel® Xeon® E3-1200 processor and a PCI-E 2.0 x8 expansion slot. MicroCloud integrates advanced technologies within a compact functional design to deliver high performance in environments with space and power limitations. The entire system is designed with efficiency in mind from its ease of maintenance to its high-efficiency, redundant Platinum Level (94%+) power modules. These combined features provide a compelling, cost-effective solution for IT professionals implementing new hosting architectures for SMB and Public/Private Cloud Computing applications.

The Boston MicroBlade is an innovation to green computing with the extreme-density, high-efficiency.

The MicroBlade is engineered with the most advanced power saving, modular architecture designs and incorporates

Intel’s latest low-power Atom C2000 processors to dramatically increase compute density and maximize performance per watt, per dollar, per square foot. With 112 full featured energy efficient compute nodes per 6U, MicroBlade brings a new cost-effective, environment friendly microserver option to the table for rapidly expanding data centers and cloud service providers.

Based on the Mellanox OpenCloud architecture, CloudX helps you deliver an efficient cloud platform using off-the-shelf building blocks.

CloudX can be designed as an opensource environment, enabling the installation, provisioning, diagnostics and maintenance of the cloud in the data centre. As well as reducing the cost of using a compute and storage infrastructure, CloudX enables applications to use much more data in real time to achieve results earlier, allowing for faster decisions. Built around the fastest interconnect technology of 40 and 56Gb/s Infiniband and Ethernet, CloudX provides the fastest data transfer and effective utilisation of compute, storage and flash components. n

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ISSUE 19

Collaboration Tools: Tom Homer

Power to the people – matching the right communications tools to the job Tom Homer of Telstra reveals how collaboration technologies and tools can be the difference between a strong hire and a skills gap.

Tom Homer Tom Homer is Head of EMEA and the Americas Enterprise, at telecoms business Telstra. Tom has over 20 years’ experience in IT and telecommunications, including 10 years managing relationships with multinational enterprises at AT&T combined with a range of senior roles at Energis and Reliance Globalcom

I

n a global market where businesses are competing vigorously to recruit the best talent, the collaboration technologies and tools available to employees – such as integrated messaging, voice and video services – can be the difference between strong hires and skills gaps.

Additionally, it’s not just potential recruits that take a keen interest in the technologies used by businesses; existing employees are also likely to weigh up their employer’s capabilities in this area when looking at their future career options.

But recruitment is only one business area affected by decisions about tools and technologies. The choices made by organisations can also dictate how efficiently workers complete their tasks and communicate, by providing

opportunities such as remote working and streamlined collaboration channels.

As such, satisfying workers’ technology expectations should be among a business’ top priorities.

The Rise of the Superuser Recently, we interviewed IT decisionmakers in large private sector multinational organisations in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, UK and the US, to determine how workers were using technologies to communicate and collaborate.

The report, Rise of the Superuser, reveals considerable opportunity for businesses to improve in this area – and potentially gain an edge over their

competitors. Interestingly, we discovered that nearly all IT leaders find it challenging to implement the technologies employees expected in the workplace, which included remote access, desktop virtualisation and video conferencing.

Despite considering end-user expectations more than ever before, almost half think their business has higher priority IT projects than delivering technology that met these needs. Our research also shows improving the user experience, promoting innovation and enhancing internal collaboration rank behind security, efficiency and cost reduction IT projects, demonstrating that many end users weren’t getting the attention they deserved.

Additionally, our research indicates that employees are generally becoming more vocal about their technology wants and needs, and driving productivity by helping lead the adoption of collaboration tools.

If IT departments do not respond to employees’ demands around collaboration tools and technologies, users are likely to obtain what they need from other sources – and the business faces the emergence

of ‘shadow IT’. Because shadow IT involves the adoption of IT by business departments without reference to the technology function, it can leave a business considerably more exposed.

Let your people lead the way So how can private sector multinationals – and other businesses − best manage the adoption of new collaboration tools and technologies in the workplace?

The key is to take steps such as listening to employee expectations, choosing employees to champion certain tools and supporting the new technologies with appropriate security.

It’s also important to ensure your communication tools mirror the different demands of the individuals that work for you – identifying how best to empower a CEO to work effectively on the road will be different to customer service operatives for example. The key is to cater to all and do so at a price point which is realistic – the zero capex option of cloud based services helps you to do this very effectively.

One way a business and its IT department can help meet user expectations is to nominate selected users to champion collaboration technologies. By involving these employees in activities such as identifying user requirements, selecting the right product or service and training and advising its workforce, a business can minimise resistance to change and maximise employees’ use of the selected tools.

An organisation should review its IT security, policies and architecture to accommodate newer ways of delivering collaboration technology, including as a service from the cloud. This gives it the opportunity to embrace pay as you go and other innovative ways of delivering IT services to its business units. It can also help minimise the possibility of shadow IT emerging within those teams.

Allowing employees to determine the collaboration tools and technologies they adopt can help businesses establish a culture of engagement and participation. This will encourage innovation and help it lure the best and brightest new talents to fuel further success. n

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ISSUE 19

Hybrid Cloud: Graham Jarvis

Why is hybrid cloud the way forward?

Graham Jarvis looks at the future of hybrid cloud in 2015 and talks to the businesses defining the hybrid market.

From Left: Clive Longbottom, Client Services Director at analyst firm Quocirca. Bryan Foss, Independent Director and Visiting Professor at Bristol Business School and Richard Munro Chief Technologist of vCloud Air at VMware

T

he hybrid cloud is not new, having been around now for several years. Industry analysts and commentators are nevertheless declaring that it has now become the way forward because it embraces the benefits of public and private cloud technologies. For example, Avanade’s 2014 ‘Global Study: Hybrid Cloud – From Hype to Reality’ reveals that more than three quarters of C-level leaders have realised that the hybrid cloud model will give them a competitive advantage. It also finds that a further 69% of the respondents think that it’s where organisations should focus in 2015. Yet the problem is that that many of them don’t really know what it is and how to deploy it.

Organisations focus on cloud technologies was once mainly about creating cost-efficiencies, but they now view it as a strategic asset. They also lack the skills and tools to take advantage of the wide array of benefits it offers, such as the ability to go to market more quickly than they could previously. In spite of these challenges Richard Munro, Chief Technologist of vCloud Air at VMware, thinks that the key driver for the renewed interest in the hybrid cloud falls down to the fact that enterprises have realised that they can maintain their control over it in the same way they could within an on-premise environment. It also addresses customers concerns about the public cloud.

Graham Jarvis Graham Jarvis is an experienced technology and business journalist and is a staff member on CCi.

Playing the game Clive Longbottom, Client Services Director at analyst firm Quocirca, is more cynical than Munro about why hybrid cloud has suddenly been realised as the way forward. “Vendors have finally figured out that they have to be able to play the game, so rather than trying to fit their existing portfolio into either a private or public cloud pigeon hole they are adopting so as to be able to bridge the two environments”, he says.

Organisations are therefore receiving a better cohesive message, allowing them to make decisions that are based on reality, rather than on the vendors’ marketing messages. Vendors are after all going to make their own solutions sound like they’re the best in the world, and sometimes this might actually be the case. Customer needs shouldn’t be forgotten though, and so vendors are now often looking to develop a consultative approach to address them.

Pressure to deliver As the recession becomes increasingly distant Bryan Foss, Independent Director and Visiting Professor at Bristol Business School, thinks that the increasing interest in hybrid cloud has emerged from the fact that executive teams are “under increasing pressure to accelerate the achievement of their business objectives, which with a significant IT backlog in most enterprises will require new approaches and solutions to timely deliver IT in support of their business initiatives.”

He adds that cloud is no login seen as an ‘addon’ because it has matured and it subsequently has become part of the mainstream – a solution to systems challenges that are “more central to the organisation and in support of processes that may run across departments, or which can directly support services for the benefit of their clients and partners.” Furthermore, he thinks that the perceived newness of hybrid cloud

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Hybrid Cloud: Graham Jarvis environments has come at different stages across market sectors. In some cases certain sectors haven’t been prepared to use cloud technologies.

“For example, financial services firms have initially been cautious with adoption, but most industries are now finding specific solutions which have more relevance to them – perhaps higher value services that share information in their sector, or more commoditybased platform services which reduce operational costs, or which provide variable cost and scalability”, he says.

Munro adds that the primary influence is the need for regulatory compliance within any sector. “Those sectors like financial services or the public sector are understandably more cautious about relinquishing control over their data and the services they deploy in the cloud.” He says that vCloud Air solves this issue.

No re-building or re-writing With regards to the veracity of the move by VMware and Microsoft to push the ability to build in private cloud, without having to re-build or re-write, and about whether organisations can really do this, Longbottom says: “Yes they can, as long as they stay essentially on the same cloud.” He has observed that Microsoft want people to use Azure and VMware VMcloud. In his opinion is it “far better to look to a more open platform such as Openstack as this can be used internally and workloads can be moved move to any other OpenStack cloud.” An advantage of this approach is that if an organisation falls out with its service provider, it can then be ported to a different one – which he thinks would be harder with VMware and almost impossible to do with Microsoft.

Best of both worlds Nevertheless hybrid cloud is touted as offering the best of both worlds. It can encourage organisations to overcome their fear of putting sensitive data into a public cloud environment. It overcomes some other issues too. For example, Longbottom says that the private cloud “still suffers from a need for accurate and meaningful systems architecting, and as organisations will only be running their own workloads, they have difficulty in engineering for peak loads and so on.”

Addressing security In contrast the infrastructure can be shared with a multitude of other customers, making it likely that spare resources will be more available than with a private cloud ay any one moment in time. Yet as people still fear the dismal and rare prospect of a security breach, he thinks that organisations will still want to keep their ‘crown jewels’ of data within a private cloud. At the same time he believes they don’t want to

be constrained as to when they can move workloads into the public cloud. For this reason a hybrid cloud platform makes senses, but its success requires having the ability to access the right cloud management tools to manage both public and private clouds as a single

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solution to addressing their security concerns starts in his opinion with what they are doing today. Some of the recently publicised security breaches have involved onpremise environments, so it’s not just a cloud problem and so he believes that this fact strengthens the need for having a single managed approach to their own IT security.

“We have a financial services customer who has large racks of hardware and software security management, which they use for their on-premise environment; they can co-locate the same infrastructure in the same datacentre as their vCloud Air environment, and route all of the cloud traffic through it to avoid the public cloud and internet entirely”, he explains.

Demand and maturity Foss also suggests that client demand and solution maturity have led to capabilities that are required to properly integrate development, operations and management of hybrid cloud systems because many of them are ‘ready to go’ rather than ‘ready to develop’ these days. This permits organisations to “find a practical and proven solution to match their own maturity, capability and needs.” For example, Munro says his customers always need back-end integration with non-cloud IT and legacy systems “beyond the application they are moving to the cloud and with disaster recovery they may have storage-based replication as well.” With seamless integration they gain a single solution.

Data growth isn’t in Munro’s mind the only driver that is making hybrid cloud platforms the way forward.

There is an increasing demand for new services too.

For this reason it makes sense “to use rented capacity to avoid sizing to peak levels…and because customers don’t want to manage a vast footprint of infrastructure – they just want to focus on the business end of things.” He adds that big data has a huge storage and processing overhead, but the main challenge in his view is coming from the growth of mobile and other applications.

platform rather than as two separate entities.

As for customers’ security concerns, Munro rightly says: “Organisations should always have security concerns and what matters is that they can take a confident, managed approach to solve them.” The

Forward-thinking With this growth in mind he thinks that most organisations will commit to having a cloud strategy.

This is good news for the hybrid cloud; it will become the way forward, the de facto means of deploying services because of its maturity and the challenges of the public cloud. “Customers are now realising that they have the choice and that the constraints they thought they had are no longer necessarily true”, he concludes.

So he predicts that hybrid clouds will become the norm in 2016, and this means that the niche nature of the public cloud will change into standard practice. n

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ISSUE 19

SAP UK: Kevin Kimber

Making the most of the networked economy SAP’s UK Managing Director, Kevin Kimber reveals what businesses need to focus on to make the most of the networked economy

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t’s been estimated that by 2020 there will be 2.5 billion connections between people on social networks, and 75 billion connections between smartphones, appliances, manufacturing equipment and wearable technology. This huge growth in connections between people and devices is set to drive ever greater volumes of data, opening up new opportunities and challenges for businesses.

At the heart of this new networked economy lies cloud technology. With more and more data being generated across many different sources, businesses are under pressure to use this information in order to retain loyal customers. This is the key driver

for cloud adoption and will continue to be so in the year ahead. Analysing these high volumes of data in differing forms and from different locations is becoming increasingly complicated and, as such, businesses are swiftly recognising the benefits of a cloud environment.

By leveraging data analytics in the cloud, businesses will be able to better harness the extensive structured and unstructured data that all these connections generate, and help organisations to align much more closely with their customers. Greater insights delivered through cloud computing will drive innovation and greater agility, allowing new processes and services to be developed that were

previously impossible.

However the cloud is not merely about developing new ideas and services, it will also facilitate bringing these ideas to market. The cloud will bring new speed to the process, helping businesses not only react to customer demand, but actually shape new trends.

Another important aspect of cloud technology is the shift towards a subscription based or pay-as- you go economy. The cloud brings better control to businesses, enabling them to use more products as services when and where they want them, therefore helping organisations to remain flexible and elastic. The cloud will clearly continue to help

organisations take advantage of the opportunities presented by the new networked economy, but as with any major technical change, it’s not without its challenges.

In order to maximise these benefits and transition effectively to the cloud, organisations need to focus not only on people, process and technology, but also culture. IT managers need to stay focused on the desired outcomes and on remaining close to overall business objectives to ensure that the rest of the business buys into cloud deployments.

The networked economy will transform not only the way businesses operate, but society as a whole, making

life more efficient and opening up new avenues for growth. To make the most of the networked economy, businesses must remain open to new ideas, be willing to challenge convention and continually search for ways to transform their processes - cloud is a key enabler for achieving this.

Cloud technology is the platform from which businesses are able reduce waste, improve agility and increase predictability. As 2015 begins, cloud adoption is sure to accelerate, helping businesses realise the full potential of big data and take their first steps into the new networked economy that is set to alter the landscape like never before. n

Kevin Kimber Kevin Kimber, Managing Director of Cloud at SAP UK and Ireland works closely with customers to understand their challenges and to demonstrate the value the cloud can bring.

Most recently responsible for the EMEA operations at cloud services provider, Zuora, Kevin brings with him breadth of knowledge of the cloud industry and proven sales experience in the enterprise space across the IT services industry. Kevin has specific experience in growing and developing cloud start-ups in new regions.

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ISSUE 19

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ISSUE 19

33

Law: Alessandro Porro

A focus on European Data Protection reforms The European commission are pushing through the long awaited reforms to the European Data Protection Regulation, with everything completed by the end of 2015. Alessandro Porro, VP of International at About Alessandro Ipswitch explains the impact this Alessandro joined Ipswitch in 2004, shortly thereafter becoming director of sales for Asia will have on the cloud.

Pacific and Latin America. Alessandro spent over twelve years successfully leading international sales both in the IT and manufacturing sectors, in Latin America (Southern Cone), Europe (Germany/ Italy), and the United States.

A

t the end of January 2015 the European Union (EU) Parliament announced that it wants a single data protection law in place across Europe by end of 2015.

This law is due to be passed through European Parliament and will impact any organisation that gathers, processes and stores personal data, and should a business fail to comply with the law, it has the power to inflict significant fines.

What is GDPR? GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is part of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is currently a draft regulation, due to come into effect in early 2015, designed to unify and simplify data protection across the 28 member countries of the European Union (EU).

The GDPR includes a strict data protection compliance regime with severe penalties of up to 100 million euros or up to five percent of worldwide turnover for organisations in breach of its rules.

The proposal for the GDPR was released in January 2012 and the EU is said to be planning for adoption over the coming few months. It is not yet final.

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What problem is it designed to address?

The regulation is designed to address blurred lines around the protection of personal data. It is expected to address globalisation and developments in how we use, share and store data. For instance, it will tackle data protection in relation to social networks and cloud computing, including secure file transfer and the right to be forgotten.

The draft GDPR is very specific that personal data is any information relating to an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional or public life. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information or a computer’s IP address. There may be an exception for employee data, which could be subject to individual country regulations.

How are organisations currently reporting data breaches?

Does it vary by country?

Each country currently has its own Data Protection authority. In the UK it is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Because the current GDPR draft is a regulation rather than a directive, it means it will directly apply to all EU member states without any national changes in legislation. There will be one Single Data Protection Authority (DPA) responsible for each company depending on where the Company is based.

The GDPR will have a significant impact on non-European companies that operate in the EU. The GDPR will make the law apply to non-European companies that trade in the EU as well as to European companies, reflecting that in today’s age, business has become borderless.

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Law: Alessandro Porro Why is more regulation needed?

There have not been any major changes to data protection law since 1995. The world we live and work in has changed significantly since then and new regulation is needed to ensure that personal data is kept safe and treated consistently across all EU countries.

How can GDPR help?

The development of public, private, government and hybrid cloud computing services has complicated data storage and processing over the last twenty years.

The GDPR will help by clarifying the responsibilities of organisations relating to the data they handle and store, thus making it easier for both European and nonEuropean companies to comply and avoid penalties.

What impact will this have on organisations?

If the draft is implemented in its current form, organisations will need to consider if and how they change the way they collect, process and store data.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) lays out the changes that organisations will need to abide by in its report entitled ‘Making sense of European Data Protection Regulations.’

There are eleven key areas outlined that range from gaining consent to collect data to fully documenting any breach.

For instance, not only do organisations need to put in place a clear privacy policy to be provided to anyone it holds data on, but they also need to be able to provide them with a copy of their personal data in a format that can be easily electronically transmitted. Organisations will also need the capability to delete all customer data on request under the ‘right to be forgotten’. This part of the regulation is already influencing the behaviour of search and social companies, such as Google and Facebook, as they prepare for GDPR. Are organisations prepared for the roll-out?

It seems that few are indeed ready. According to a recent Ipswitch survey of 316 European organisations, more than half (56%) of respondents could not accurately identify what ‘GDPR’ means. Over half of respondents (52%) admitted they were not ready for GDPR, and over a third (35%) confessed to not knowing whether their IT policies and process were up to the job. Only 14% of respondents could correctly identify that the GDPR is due to come into effect in late 2014/early 2015.

Despite the lack of awareness of regulatory change, when asked about priorities for 2015, only 13% said they planned to spend more time understanding and preparing for regulation. A quarter (26%) said they wanted to spend more time reviewing and tightening security policies and a further quarter (26%) said they

wanted to be able to spend less time on manual reporting and auditing.

In addition to testing the readiness of IT professionals, the survey also revealed that very little thought has been given to whether an organisation’s Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is ready for the change. Although 79% of those surveyed retained the services of a CSP, only 6% of them said that they had thought to ask them whether they were ready for the GDPR. What can organisations do to ensure they meet these new regulations?

GDPR includes an obligation to protect personal data across the borderless enterprise. IT professionals should review and bolster their data processing policies and practices now, before the regulation comes into effect.

There are practical steps that can be taken now to ensure that policies, procedures and technologies run by organisations are up to the job of complying with the GDPR. Contracts with data processors and Cloud Service Providers need to be reviewed. Set out to know exactly where your cloud data is hosted and understand how it is backed up and encrypted. Begin to set up procedures now to start securing explicit consent for the collection and processing of personal data.

Once confident in their systems and procedures, organisations will be able to apply for an EU Data Protection Seal which will be a five year certification of their processes. n

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WHAT IS CLOUD CONNECT? Cloud Connect provides enterprises, service providers (SPs), system integrators (SIs) and carriers, private, secure and high performance connections to multiple clouds from within Interxion data centres, making it easier for them to shift business critical workloads and real time data to the cloud.

By providing a private virtual connection between the customer and the CSP, Cloud Connect enables organisations to bypass the public Internet and achieve service level guarantees on latency, throughput and security. As a result the service enables enterprises, carriers and SPs/SIs to build complex hybrid IT solutions with the CSPs of their choice over a single connection.

Cloud connect makes it easy to do business, offering online ordering via the Interxion portal and enabling customers to manage their virtual local area network (LAN) connection to each CSP. This improves the privacy and performance of their cloud service connections and quickens their cloud deployment time.

Gartner forecasts that nearly half of all enterprises will utilise hybrid cloud deployments by 2017 and therefore there is a real need for data centre providers to understand the complexities of hybrid environments and have the technical capabilities to provide easy interconnections. Cloud Connect ensures that Interxion customers can access their multi-cloud hybrid environments and connect to our growing CSP community in an easy, cost-effective way.

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ISSUE 19

Interview: Jelle Frank

The future is Hybrid IT In this month’s interview CCI talks exclusively to Jelle Frank Van Der Zwet, Interxion’s Director of Business Development and Marketing for the Cloud about the future for cloud in 2015.

Jelle Frank Jelle Frank manages the panEuropean marketing and product development programme for Interxion and has over 12 years of experience working in ICT product and business development.

Prior to joining Interxion, he was responsible for product management and marketing of managed services at Imtech ICT, and was Senior Product Marketing manager at UPC, responsible for data services in the Netherlands and he began his career working in marketing management positions for KPN and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

Q

– How has businesses’ approach to the cloud changed in the last year?

A - I think we are on the start of a big wave in the migration of business critical applications. Over the last year it has become clear what we are using the cloud for, and that includes development of applications that fit better in the cloud.

We are seeing more work on the migration of business critical applications. Partly this is due to the market maturing and tools like Microsoft’s Azure and IBM SoftLayer are now growing in comparison to Amazon. Which then impacts on cloud growth. Microsoft, has a very large

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footprint, in the business to business space, and hence they’re starting to see a lot of growth in that space.

Q - So the applications you are seeing were new applications but the next wave is moving legacy applications to the cloud? Is this also partly due to things like Windows Server 2003 support coming to an end?

A - I think it’s almost natural that it will happen. It is natural for organisation when a licence or support comes to the end, to look at the alternatives. It is the same with hardware. We used to use servers for perhaps 3 to 4 years, we now – because of the recession - use them a little bit longer, but at a certain point you need to replace them. It has always been like that, but the only difference now is they have other options including cloud.

Q -Is it also because there are more tools and services to help them move their applications?

A - Yes, definitely. I think a lot of cloud migration is not just fork-lifting an application from one place to another.

It’s about making the application cloud enabled, and that’s where software as a service providers can benefit. The

company will find out that moving a workload from one platform to another, is not going to give them the full benefits of cloud. It’s just another way of outsourcing.

Q -What can they gain by creating a cloud-enabled version?

A – One of the barriers to entry has been connectivity. Legacy applications typically need 100% uptime and low-latency guaranteed. I think an interesting development is in connectivity, and we saw the start of this last year, but I think the impact will be greater this year. Last year saw the other platform providers starting to follow Amazons Direct Connect solution. We saw Microsoft launch Express Route and SoftLayer Direct link, and these solutions enables enterprises to bypass the Internet, to get private access to their favourite public cloud, and to get that with guarantees on interconnect and performance.

This will enable a lot of them to put their business critical workloads, or part of this workload in the public cloud.

Q – Do you see businesses looking to hybrid cloud, to solve some of this problem?

A - For me 2015 is all about hybrid.

But I think we mustn’t call it hybrid cloud, it should be called hybrid IT. Because cloud is just one element of that, and hybrid IT allows you to apply this to different types of solution, from on premise, co-location, and outsourcing.

I think IT departments will make decisions about what type of cloud to use on a workload by workload basis.

The take up of hybrid and tools like Direct Connect obviously means the role of co-location becomes more and more important. Businesses also now have additional questions to consider; including ‘where am I going to put the data?’, and ‘where can I find these on and off- ramps for cloud?’ Effectively the data centre becomes the new centre of hybrid IT. Q – Will this happen quickly?

A - First of all this is at a very early stage. There are not very many countries where you can find these on and off-ramps to the public cloud. The uptake in the market for hybrid IT is in the areas where you can find those on and off-ramps. At the moment I see the initial interest is from service providers to offer this to their end users. It enables them to use this technology in their own services.

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Interview: Jelle Frank

Say for example you are a Microsoft partner, and you have built your cloud solution on Microsoft. Then Express Route enables them to integrate that into Azure and offer a hybrid solution to their enterprise customers.

It enables service providers to offer a hybrid solution, that is partly their own, and partly from their main technology provider.

Q – Are there any other long-term trends?

A - Hybrid is the most important one.

The way it is implemented, and the role of the network, signals that the market is really maturing, and that organisations are approaching it in a more mature way.

It’s not just about putting something into the cloud, the cloud is now part of their network, and their sourcing strategy. They are really beginning to look at what sort of applications they can put into the cloud, and are making it part of the decision cycle in the IT department.

Q – The tools are here but are there people to use them?

A - Traditionally IT departments have been very risk averse, so when choosing a new tool for something as important as this, they will naturally look to their current IT suppliers first.

And we find that use of those tools is gradually picking up.

Q – So are businesses implementing

cloud with a third-party because those I’m not sure what the impact will be. skills don’t exist at the moment?

It’s a case of wait and see.

A - Definitely, I think this also differs with the sector.

Q – So who is leading the pack?

Q –Where does this leave the data centre?

A - Businesses have realised that having servers in your own office A - In general you can say it’s the UK space, or managing your own and the Nordics who lead the pack datacentre doesn’t make sense in that in Europe, quickly followed by the new IT landscape. But not everything Netherlands, and Germany is definitely can move to the cloud so they will more conservative. But on the other need to consider co-location. One of hand we saw in 2014 Amazon opening the reasons will be the management up an availability zone in Frankfurt. and cost of the data centre, the other So they do understand the German will be on and off- ramps to the big market, they do understand that public clouds. There are some logical they need to be there. Additionally reasons to make co-location the there were more announcements by centre of your hybrid IT solution. companies who chose Germany as a place to put their cloud infrastructure. Q –Are there any other tips for 2015?

It says to me ‘if you want to target the German market then you have to A - I am very curious about what is be in Germany, if you want to target going to happen with the pricing of the French market you have to be in infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

France’.

Amazon has always been very keen on lowering prices a couple of times Q – What do you think of the EU Data a year and Google is following. I am Protection law reforms, do you see really curious to see where this will businesses preparing for this? end and if it will become ridiculously cheap.

A - Businesses already want to see their data close by. Of course the Q – Will it be a race for the bottom?

European regulation is important and businesses will have their own view A - I’m curious to see what happens on that, but mostly they want the with low-cost IaaS. I don’t think data to be close to where they are.

IT has ever been about choosing I don’t think businesses particularly the cheapest, but when it does think I will place my data in the US or become ridiculously cheap, how will Asia because it’s cheaper. organisations react? n

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ISSUE 19 19

Saas: John O’Keeffe

The age of ‘appification’ John O’Keeffe discusses how cloud computing has sparked the adoption of productivity software and created a new appification revolution

John O’Keeffe John O’Keeffe is VP EMEA of document productivity company Nitro and leads the European expansion from the company’s recently established EMEA headquarters in Dublin. O’Keeffe joined Nitro from Salesforce.com where he spent over 12 years in a variety of senior sales roles, most recently as VP, SMB Sales for Europe. He was the 9th employee of Salesforce in Europe

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ave after wave of technological innovation has crashed over businesses in the last few decades.

Gone are the days when having a PC and an up-to-date office suite was the cutting-edge of corporate IT. Of course, some innovations have had bigger impacts than other. Cloud technology is the latest trend reaching the threshold of widespread adoption. The recent IPO of Box attests to the success of cloud storage companies. Much of the excitement around cloud technology is based on the door it opens to the quick adoption of other business intelligence tools. It is clearly one of the main forces driving the explosive growth of productivity software.

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From the Coalface: Darren Woollard

The growth of workplace communications Collaborative software tools, like Slack and Join.Me, which facilitate workplace communications are experiencing unprecedented growth. More established players like Salesforce and Evernote are rapidly growing the services they offer enterprises, such as Salesforce’s analytics cloud Wave. The e-signature market, which had seen slower uptake than other productivity tools, grew by 40% in 2014 and Docusign recently reported 70% year-on-year growth. Players in the productivity market also have the exciting prospect of growth in Western markets being matched in emerging markets as the relatively low cost of cloud computing allows countries like China and Brazil to quickly catch up.

Globalisation of the workplace The fall in the cost of cloud technology is only one driver of growth; the bigger factor is the changing workforce dynamic.

Globalisation has had the effect of spreading employees and clients out across the world, separated by distance and time zones. The ubiquity of mobile and tablet use also means that home and work hours have blurred and telecommuting is on a rapid rise. According to Global Workplace Analytics, regular telecommuters will total 3.9 million by 2016, an increase of 21% on 2014. Nearly two-thirds of employees now use their personal devices for work purposes. The actual binds that tie employees to their employer have also weakened. Intuit has predicted that over 40% of the US workforce will be freelance, contractors or

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ISSUE 19

Saas: John O’Keeffe

temporary workers by 2020.

With a more remote, transient and mobile workforce, the business case for productivity and collaborative software becomes pressing. Using productivity software to project manage, edit and annotate, communicate and sign-off actions not only increases efficiency but also aids in transparency. There is no need to arrange cross-country conference calls at anti-social hours and employees based far away from their office can show their progress on projects in real time.

The age of ‘appification’ Adoption of productivity software has also been aided by the rise of apps. People in general are now much more comfortable utilising a range of different apps on multiple devices. In their day to day lives, people often use productivity tools to help with social media management, content creation and file sharing. It is therefore less of a leap to use the same type of technology in their work life.

According to WinterGreen Research, the cloud-based collaboration market will be worth $21 billion by 2018.

Growth is not expected to stop there. Surprisingly, a Harris Interactive survey in 2013 found that 92% of workers still review documents via email, 88% report experiencing document collaboration issues and only 2% of contracts executed in the US were e-signed. These statistics have revealed huge scope for growth. Again, cloud technology will underpin this expansion. A survey Nitro recently conducted found that organisations with between one and 100 employees were adopting cloud storage at a faster rather than larger businesses, at a rate of 12% versus 7%.

With businesses of any size able to use cloud technology, the door is firmly open for them to take advantage of productivity software.

Salesforce has recognised this trend by increasing its focus on the SMB market with shorter sales cycles, less integration and compliance challenges and a shorter adoption curve.

In some ways we’re entering a perfect storm in relation to the adoption of productivity software. The unrelenting growth of cloud, the ‘appification’ of our daily lives, the use of multiple devices and the globalised nature of business, means that productivity software is no longer an optional extra for a cuttingedge company, but an indispensable component of the modern workplace. n

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