ESG Blogs

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with the IBM Cloud team on a couple of projects and met with some great professionals with significant expertise in disaster recovery and data protection in general. The IBM Cloud team leverages a number of partners in its ecosystem and IBM services.  As the title of this short post indicates, keep an eye on IBM Cloud, as they have built and are working on furthering a great platform for BC/DR. 

NetApp's annual Insight event wrapped recently. Right off the bat, I must record that I thought this was a lesson to many other vendors about how best to run a digital event. It was fast-paced, enjoyable and easy to watch. And that matters; the best content in the world is wasted if a vendor has poor and/or boring presentations...NetApp did a stellar job of embracing the new medium. Luckily, the content also did not disappoint. In the video below, Scott Sinclair and I discuss some of our key takeaways.

IBM’s announcement last week that it is to split into two companies by spinning off a big chunk of itself leads with a compellingly bold statement, saying it is “…to accelerate hybrid cloud growth strategy and execute spin-off market-leading managed infrastructure services unit.” By the way, when I say “big chunk,” I actually mean a relatively small percentage (just under 25% of current revenues)…but anything at IBM-scale is big compared to most businesses; the NewCo has a current revenue run-rate of $19BN, a backlog of $60BN and does business with 75% of the Fortune 100. Not bad, eh!?

HPE’s Discover 2020 virtual event continued this week, with a day focused on storage. On the whole, HPE’s virtual Discover experience has been impressive, entertaining, and well managed. Check it out, the content is still available.

With typical understatement, no assertive flourishes, and a complete lack of competitive gauntlet-throwing, Oracle’s Larry Ellison just announced – separate but linked – enhancements to its overall cloud strategy. Well, actually no - of course not!! While the announcements were strategic, real, and compelling, there were flashes-aplenty of the Larry we have come to expect (even from a shelter-in-place, and rather-nice-looking, kitchen)…a feisty and assured red stake placed firmly in the increasingly hybrid IT landscape.  

IT organizations that are running a data center have a set of challenges on their hands given that the teams are working from home (WFH). Data centers are like your automobile that requires hands-on scheduled and unplanned maintenance. Well-run data centers are a fine oiled piece of machinery that is constantly worked on to meet and deliver business demand. IT organizations are masters at this, but what happens when the team is mandated to WFH?

On-premises integration is vital to hybrid cloud strategies. Many organizations have an on-premises-first mindset as they begin to formulate their hybrid cloud strategies. According to ESG research into hybrid cloud trends, when asked to identify the most important consideration in these decisions, more than half cited seamless compatibility with their on-premises infrastructure. Furthermore, nearly three-quarters of organizations stated that it was critical or very important that public cloud service providers offer solutions that integrate with their on-premises environments.

Oracle ultimately had to choose a cloud partner as customer demand for cloud consumption continues to rise. In fact, ESG captured a 10% year over year increase (29% to 39%) of companies that are taking a cloud first policy when it comes to new application deployments. These dynamics cranked up the pressure on the Oracle business as they seemed to try to hold on to legacy on-premises approaches with their customers. And why not….margins are excellent and it is a massive investment for Oracle to build out global data centers. Sure, Oracle has cloud offerings, but they appeared to be more like nice window dressing than what the likes of Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google GCP are offering (and expanding) in the market.

First, let's clarify what would drive businesses to consider moving cloud on-prem:

As the ESG team gears up to attend Google NEXT, these are some of the hot spots we will be focused on:

• The first and most obvious will be to see what stakes Thomas Kurian is driving into the ground to help drive Google Cloud execution in the market and candidly to see how they intend to close the gap with AWS and Microsoft Azure.
• Google NEXT has historically scored an A on technology and a C on a clearly defined message and execution strategy into the enterprise. My observation is that attendees participate in Google NEXT because they see great things with the technology but have historically walked away without a clear path to simple things that are highly relevant to enterprise IT--e.g., virtual machine migration, basic cloud readiness assessment, and relevance of legacy IT that is anchored to on-prem infrastructure and process.