2013, year of the Cloud?
Traditional enterprise companies are now migrating from on-premise deployments to a cloud deployment. Now is the time to differentiate why a different kinds of cloud deployments, such as multi-tenant vs managed service, are more beneficial. And if you haven’t thought about the business operations needed to support a SaaS model, well you better get started!
What are the main benefits of a multi-tenant cloud approach? Scalability, Elasticity, Agility.
Here is Jonah Kowall’s take on Splunk’s latest launch, Splunk Cloud:
“Cloud – This one is the most interesting to my coverage, but as I dug into it more it wasn’t really cloud, but it does help enable customers (which is a good thing). This Cloud offering is actually a managed services offering run by Splunk on AWS. They still go through and spec and implement an environment for each customer based on their requirements, so there are services involved. The nice part about the offering is that Amazon has very low storage costs (especially since you can leverage S3 for low cost, and Glacier for even lower cost), and often with high retention requirements the cost of infrastructure can sometimes be higher than the cost of the Splunk licenses. The other interesting bit is that it offers the option to connect with on-premise Splunk deployments for universal visibility across all types of application and infrastructure.”
Why are enterprise companies migrating to SaaS, creating hybrid offerings, or shifting offerings to managed services?
Dev Ittycheria, president of Enterprise Service Management at BMC, is shifting to SaaS because “After carefully observing and analyzing the SaaS market, we believe this is the right time for BMC to make an aggressive move into SaaS. The overwhelmingly positive response from customers, partners and the analyst community is clear confirmation that the market needs access to an enterprise-class ITSM SaaS solution that makes no compromise.” See: BMC Software Reshapes Enterprise IT Service Management with Launch of Remedy ITSM On Demand.
The industry is changing, and new technologies are creating new communications channels. In an article covering last week’s cloud session at Interop, Brian Butte, chief architect, financial services for AT&T, said “Not only is transformation needed in back end platforms, but business models need to change to. Most systems are still based on a 1-800 inbound number. Customers now are interacting with businesses in new ways. They are using mobile apps, email, chat and social media,” See: How Lack of Expertise Is Hampering Cloud Adoption.
Customers have new ways to interact with businesses, and are going into IT procurement with the expectation for flexible models around pricing, scale, and business agility/constant innovation.
