As a response to this elevated market interest and transition to integrated computing platforms, ESG published our latest Market Landscape Report: Virtual Computing Infrastructures: The Movement Toward Integrated Computing: The Foundations for Cloud.

The report is available to premium subscribers at the ESG website.

IT is at a tipping point as more organizations consider investing in this new consumption model. This report helps to identify:

• The key benefits and driving factors of virtual computing infrastructures
• The primary challenges and concerns surrounding virtual computing infrastructures
• Tips for IT to use to help decide when to make a shift to a virtual computing infrastructure
• Approaches for making an educated investment that fulfills short-term growth requirements and accommodates long-term IT strategies
• Potential vendor solutions

You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.

In 2009, people were 3X more likely to cancel an IT project, or cut headcount to contain costs then they were to use cloud services.

By 2011, folks were just as likely to consider implementing a cloud solution to contain costs as they were to kill a project or fire people.

2012 data tells us that we’ve crossed the chasm – people are now MORE likely to use cloud techniques as a cost containment/reduction strategy then they are to shoot a project or get rid of people.

This, my friends, is a tipping point. (How many more book themes will I steal in this blog, I wonder?)

Cost reduction/containment is by far the most important catalyst to a long term, thriving market opportunity. Always. Strategic value (i.e., making money on your decision versus saving money by your decision) is always secondary. Always.

Thus, we can now assume that cloud has moved mainstream – and will only accelerate. As soon as a market accepts you as a valid cost containment/reduction strategy, you are invited backstage, where the deals happen.

So, what’s that mean? Markets become interesting when the status quo is upset. The status quo likes things, well, to stay the same. The same being “you give me money, I spend it. You bitch about it, then you give me more money.” Something that derails that flow tends to upset those on the receiving end.

So as more and more people adopt cloud-based strategies (initially) to cut costs, who among the status quo will be negatively affected? Want to know how to figure it out in your own shop? See which sales guys start coming around way more often than normal. See how many times they call you “Buddy!” lately. Those are the ones at risk. Those are the ones who will react in violent opposition (overt or covert) to your move to the cloud.

Those are the ones who will adapt (quickly) or perish (slowly and painfully).

Game on!

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

• Executive sponsorship
• Long term forward IT thinking (Note: this is difficult to find since most CIOs get bonuses on a yearly basis and not for long-term cloud strategies)
• Self assessment and discovery to identify successful opportunities
• A skill set mix that breaks down the barriers between IT disciplines and flattens the IT organization
• Application experience to truly understand the application, its impact on IT infrastructure, and more importantly, its impact on the business
• Economic and financial analysis that involves the CFO and key stakeholders in the business
• Legal and contract knowledge to negotiate and help transform the business to alternative consumption models
• And perhaps most importantly, transparency. From an end-user’s perspective, the transition to any internal, external, hybrid, public cloud strategy should be completely invisible and transparent.

There is not a single solution that is going to solve your cloud computing initiative. Rather, it is a set of services, education, and training that will shift IT into the next era of computing.

You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.

You can read Mark’s other blog entries at Liquefying IT.

Petfood.com or Furniture.com didn’t fail because the Internet didn’t work. They failed because they had stupid business models. There are plenty of stupid business models wrapped around cloud. There also are some that are beginning to stand out as viable.

People crap all over Amazon‘s services–but let me be the one to tell you–their model works. They are light years ahead of most of the world in providing IaaS services that (importantly) people actually want. They provide them in ways people want them. Are they perfect for everything? Of course not, but where they fit the use case, they are in a class by themselves–and as such, continue to kick ass with no imminent threat to their model. The first guy to solve a real problem owns that market 99% of the time.

So why doesn’t everyone only use Amazon? Because they don’t solve ALL problems. They are awesome at renting transient compute resources, but they sort of stink at storage (economically at least). That may change, as they are proving to be super smart, in my opinion–but until then look who else is reaping the rewards.

Box, Dropbox, and Nirvanix are hot and heavy in the middle of a financial love affair. Why? Because they are storing stuff more effectively and economically than Amazon. Dropbox is cheap and dirty (and it works!) but folks aren’t putting BIG important data out there (or are they? they are certainly putting small important data out there). Box’s claim is that they are a “business class” version of Dropbox–and judging by their most recent valuation, they seem to be right. Box has built “TRUST” into their brand. Nirvanix has become the absolute darling of the media/entertainment archive world–and now they are moving to standard archives. USC just plopped an 8PB single order on them. 8PB! Wasn’t that more capacity than existed in the entire world just a decade ago?

Why do people use these services? Because A: doing it yourself SUCKS, and B: the cost of letting someone else deal with it is at the inflection point–it’s becoming inarguable when you know that A: it sucks to do yourself and B: it’s now cheaper to do it elsewhere.

To reach a broad market, you have to have both. A better way, and a cheaper way. Until it’s cheaper, people will fight to keep control even when it sucks. Once you hit both metrics, you can watch the market erupt. That seems to be where we are.

So why hasn’t Verizon or Comcast taken off yet when it comes to IaaS? Because it’s not what they do. They won’t be able to play here until the customer comes calling on them–which they will eventually. What those guys have is (enviably) access to the customer, and perhaps more importantly, a billing relationship. What they don’t have is a natural business disposition based on relatively complex topics like IaaS for a “business.” They all want it, but emerging markets require specialization and speed–not exactly what you think of when you talk about AT&T.

So while Cisco, EMC, NTAP, etc., have done a good job stuffing their gear into the big Telco/would-be IaaS providers, they have to wait for demand to occur from the ultimate end-user before that gear gets consumed. They will start to help their customer market services, to enable that consumption–but that’s tough to get going. Comcast does a trillion dollars selling video on demand, so getting them to learn a new language, no matter how great it can be for them, is brutally difficult and slow.

Ironically, it’s HP, Dell, and IBM that have the real ability to change the game on a grand scale in this space. Dell was early with a spillover cloud, but I haven’t heard all that much about it lately. HP is just gearing up now, but has the right things in place (imagine being able to sell cloud CONSUMPTION as a business model when you have that many customers globally!) and IBM (perhaps the most committed to cloud) is still moving pieces around–but have shown they see both the cloud consumption opportunity AND their own brand value. Like other behemoths, they aren’t specializing however, and as such need to orchestrate bigger, more elaborate moves–which will slow them down. (Possible exception is IBM, who did do a deal with Nirvanix so, at least in the storage space, has a place to go).

So the moral today? Specialize on a problem (that is real, and getting worse vs. better organically) and focus on driving the economics to a tipping point. Clear as a cloud.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

• Big Data – Why am I thankful for Big Data? Well, because it may be the one initiative that finally stops everyone talking about “cloud” – even though it may create an everything “big” theme – you will of course need “big storage” to hold the “big data,” and leverage “big compute” to process it, and “big networks” to transport it –you get the point. If it has not been done already, now would be the time to trademark Big anything! All joking aside, the ability to analyze vast amounts of data could have a really cool impact beyond accelerating search functions – think about accelerating the time to cure diseases by leveraging larger data sets–pretty cool stuff. (For more on Big Data, check out ESG’s Julie Lockner’s blog )
• Solid State Drives – More specifically the Solid State Drive that Dan D from ESG’s IT department put in my PC that now makes starting my PC and opening applications almost bearable. Granted, it’s not close to MAC performance, but at least now I don’t have to wait 5+ minutes to boot up. So while SSDs are impacting the larger overall market (see Mark Peter’s ESG research on Solid State Storage Trends), it has also had a major impact on my day to day productivity! Thanks Dan.
• Cloud Computing – All previous jokes aside about all the cloud washing that has occurred, this is really starting to take hold and not just with service providers and Amazon anymore, a lot of enterprises are getting into the game as well. Thanks to the combined efforts of companies like VMware, Microsoft, Cisco, Brocade, HDS, EMC, NetApp, as well as solutions from Dell, IBM, HP and Oracle- organizations can now buy their own cloud computing building blocks, like Vblocks, FlexPods, Converged Infrastructures, Cloud Matrix, and Cloud Burst. These are greatly accelerating the time to value for enterprises and typically purpose built for specific solutions like Virtual Desktops. (Look for a market landscape report soon on these converged infrastructures by my ESG colleague Mark Bowker).
• Open Flow Programmable networks – This is a really cool open source project to separate the control plane and hardware, enabling centralized control of a network. I like this because it makes you rethink the way things have always been done. While it is still in its infancy it has the potential to really change the way we architect our networks. (For more info see Jon Oltsik’s recent blog post. )

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

You can read Bob’s other blog entries at Data Center Continuum.

That’s where the ESG Lab validation of NEC’s ProgrammableFlow comes in. NEC has taken the OpenFlow standard and created a powerful software driven networking solution that allows IT professionals true dynamic provisioning of network resources to support application requirements. In today’s virtual server environments this is an exciting proposition as now your network can be as nimble as your virtual deployment.

I won’t go into the details of the full report here, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of these solutions developed for the commercial market. It’s easy to see how this new architecture can reap huge benefits for both public and private clouds.

Click here to read the full lab report and see how ProgrammableFlow can be a viable solution for today’s enterprise network.

Until recently, Axcient has focused on delivering a hybrid backup Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution on a pay-as-you-grow, capacity-consumption model. Subscribers back up data to a local storage appliance and it is automatically sent to Axcient’s secure cloud. If a server fails, the local device can be used as a failover system to run a virtual copy of the server … until the primary system can be recovered or replaced.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)—many that don’t have a second site for failover purposes—can now extend their recovery strategies to one where downtime can be minimized or eliminated. If an interruption in IT services occurs at the primary location, subscribers can continue to make their applications and data available by launching Axcient cloud-based servers via the Axcient Cloud Continuity service. Axcient’s cloud platform enables businesses to maintain uptime and access business applications and data from any Internet-enabled device.

Axcient’s approach is not new. There are many IT organizations today executing cloud-based IT continuity services. Many of them are home grown, leveraging popular cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services. The difference here is that Axcient has taken all of the guesswork out of its solution. SMBs subscribe, have an Axcient box installed, and start moving data to the cloud. There’s no upfront CapEx investment and no fancy programming that needs to be completed to integrate backups with cloud services. SMBs short on financial capital and IT professionals—and downtime tolerance—can, for a monthly service fee and a few mouse clicks, make downtime a thing of the past.

via Cloud Networking Demand Fuels Citrix Revenue Growth – NewsFactor Network.

via Advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service – Data Center Knowledge.