Category: Networking the Cloud

Cloud Will Transform Business As We Know It: The Secret’s In The Source

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I am involved in the following seminar based on joint research we are doing on Cloud Computing…

 

 

 
HfS Research, in partnership with the Outsourcing Unit of the London School of Economics, is hosting a special webinar, sponsored by Accenture, on the groundbreaking study of Cloud Business Services that HfS and LSE recently released.

Join HfS Research Founder and CEO Phil Fersht, HfS Managing Director Euan Davis, Professor Leslie Willcocks, Professor for Work, Technology and Globalization at London School of Economics, and Managing Director of Cloud Services at Accenture Jimmy Harris.

The issues on the table include:

– The contrasting views and intentions of business and IT executives toward Cloud Business Services

– The impact of Cloud on work culture and delivering competitive advantage

– How both business and IT executives need to tool-up and prepare to adopt Cloud Business Services

– The crucial role service providers need to play as Cloud Business enablers for today’s organizations

 

 

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/744155947

 

Accenture Outlook: The coming of the cloud corporation

Dr Will Venters2 Comments

I have written, with two colleagues, an article for Accenture’s Outlook journal which introduces the idea of the Cloud Corporation:

Accenture Outlook: The coming of the cloud corporation.

The article discusses various trends in outsourcing which will impact upon Cloud (and vice versa).

Cloud computing remains focused on cost cutting achieved through new technology, however lessons from the past suggest that this is only a minor part of the disruptive innovation which Cloud may offer. In particular we should not ask “what is cloud computing?” but rather “why is cloud computing?” – in essence exploring the pressures on innovation today which resonate with the idea of utility computing.

While the cost saving is an important incremental innovation on existing practices, it is cloud’s potential to allow new forms of organisational collaboration which offer the potential of radical innovation. Moving the data-centre outside the organisation asks us to evaluate the relationship between the data-centre and the organisation. Is it “ours” to horde and control, or are parts of it able to be shared, opened, exploited by others (partners, customers, suppliers etc)? In turn does this opening of the relationship between the organisation and its information recast the organisation itself?

 

The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management to Cloud Services

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I am teaching/facilitating  an Executive Summer School this coming summer in which my research on Cloud Computing and on Utility Computing will be presented…  In particular the team believe that Cloud needs to learn the lessons of Outsourcing. At the moment the focus is (as it was with early outsourcing) focused on cost reduction and Capex / Opex transfer. But those who had their fingers burned with the outsourcing craze quickly learned that it is through strategic collaboration rather than cost reduction that value is achieved.  Cloud providers and companies considering the cloud need to learn these lessons if they are to avoid the mistakes of the past.

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This course offers in-depth coverage of the key issues, developments and management challenges in today’s global sourcing marketplace. It provides a learning vehicle and tools, in terms of key frameworks, principles and practices, for those preparing themselves for general management  in major organizational functions or for more specific global sourcing roles, and also for experienced managers who wish to move to the next level. It  focuses on the needs of managers and senior executives working in client companies and service suppliers. It covers global sourcing, strategy, Information Technology outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) including the most recent developments in sourcing and offshoring  for such major areas as HR, Finance and Accounting, Procurement, Legal and Knowledge (KPO) functions.

To find out more click here.

The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management to Cloud Services

The Industry Speaks about Cloud, Part II: business execs fear its impact on work culture; IT execs doubt their ability to drive competitive advantage

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The Industry Speaks about Cloud, Part II: business execs fear its impact on work culture; IT execs doubt their ability to drive competitive advantage.

Friends at Horses for Sources(www.horsesforsources.com )  have published their next analysis of the huge survey we worked on together. Read their comments on the focus of Cloud Computing on work culture.

As HfS discuss, the study suggests business executives fear major cultural change  and change in working practices, whereas for IT executives the fears are more about curtailment of their value as technology-enablers within businesses.

Read their blog entry for full details.

 

 

 

Why you can’t move a mainframe with a cloud • The Register

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Why you can’t move a mainframe with a cloud • The Register.

 

This is a detailed technical analysis of the market for mainframes – discussing the infrastructure issues of moving Mainframes to cloud, or cloud to mainframes. The issues discussed are somewhat perennial – “greying workforce” shift to cheaper platforms of linux and java. But as the article attests it is the shear reliability and stability of mainframes which keeps them going – something those who proclaim the cloud will prevail must understand and respond to. With such guaranteed uptime of years  for transaction processing we cannot really envisage the Cloud for the core applications which run our information economy.

Cloud and Business – Our survey results are in…

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You will be aware that we have been running a survey along with “Horses for Sources” of industry attitudes to Cloud Computing. We received 1053 responses – an impressive sample of the business community. While I have yet to fully analyse the results HfS have done some initial sifting as shown in the following graph from their site:

Graph of results

As Phil writes in his Blog this suggest that business function leaders are more impressed with Cloud and are involved in driving its adoption – marketing to IT functions is less likely to impress than targetting business executives. Unsurprisingly it seems clear that Cloud is seen as driving down costs (50+% suggest this appeals to a great extent”) but I was most struck by the number who strongly believe it will facilitate virtual/distributed organizations (also around 50%).

This is important because it suggests they believe Cloud computing offers the chance for organisational change – not just replication of existing functions or apps. Further it is supported by Business Executives who (nearly 50% of them) belived it will “enable us to focus on transforming out business”.

Cloud, in my view, offers the chance to do things differently not just cheaply. It offers the chance for new forms of organisation to challenge existing businesses. In particular it offers the chance for businesses to collaborate in new ways. SalesForce for example allow their users to open up specific parts of their SalesForce offering to business partners simply and easily allowing closer collaboration (something which would have required massive EDI investment a few years ago). Who knows what new forms of business this technical facility, and business executive desire will open up…  One might imagine “clouds” of nimble agile small enterprises collaborating using Cloud systems to take on the big corporates. Such businesses nimbleness and close integration of systems (through the cloud) might be a potent mix.

Lock-ins, SLAs and the Cloud

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One of the significant concerns in entering the cloud is the potential for lock-in with a cloud provider (though clearly you otherwise remain locked-in with your own IT department as the sole  provider).

The cost of moving from one provider to another is a significant obstacle to cloud penetration – if you could change provider easily and painlessly you might be more inclided to take the risk. Various services have emerged to try to attack this problem – CloudSwitch being one which created a considerable buzz at the Structure 2010 conference.   Their service aims to provide  a software means to transfer enterprise applications from a company’s data centre into the cloud (and between cloud providers). Whether it can live up to expectations we have yet to know, but CloudSwitch is attempting to provide a degree of portability much desired by clients – and probably much feared by Cloud Service providers whose business would reduce to utility suppliers if they are successful.

But this links into another interesting conversation I was having with a media executive last week. They mentioned that since cloud virtual machines were so cheap they often (effectively)  host services across a number of suppliers to provide their own redundancy and thus ignore the SLA. If one service goes down they can switch quickly (using load balancers etc) to another utility supplier. Clearly this only works for commodity IaaS and for relatively simple content distribution (rather than transaction processing) but it is a compelling model… why worry about choosing one cloud provider and being locked-in or risking poor SLA  – choose them all.

Structure 2010: Akamai “Doing Terabit Events” (Thanks, World Cup)

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Structure 2010: Akamai “Doing Terabit Events” (Thanks, World Cup). Akamai are an interesting company which highlights the problems of latency within the cloud. But also check out the work going on in Stanford on OpenFlow http://www.openflowswitch.org/ which provides a similar in data-centre / campus level network latency response by centralising the control of the network routers/switches to best manage the flow of traffic. This work also reduces the complexity of the network and allows a more specific and intelligent  networking flow than achievable by existing routing tables.