ESG Blogs

Welcome to 2019 and as is the tradition at ESG, I have made a video blog with my predictions for 2019. 2018 had a number of very significant announcements that impact all areas of cloud. My predictions video covers three main areas.

First, I talked about how 2019 will be the year we see the expansion of the cloud into hybrid cloud. Both Amazon Web Services and Google made significant product announcements in this area in 2018 and it puts pressure on the incumbent leader, Microsoft, to respond.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently held their 2018 North America event in Seattle, Washington. This event was both KubeCon, for Kubernetes, but also CloudNativeCon, for all the other cloud native associated projects that the CNCF supports. The show has seen wild growth, going from 500 to 1000 to 4000 to over 8000 attendees in the four years of the show.

With the departure of Diane Greene as CEO of Google Cloud, a lot of people in the cloud industry are asking, "What is next for Google and how does Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian drive it?" First, let's talk about Google's place among the hyperscale public clouds. Contrary to some industry observers, ESG research has found that 81% of companies are using two or more public cloud providers and 51% are using three or more. Even more important, our research has found that 97% of companies expect that number to increase or stay the same in three years.

What this all means is that the public cloud market is not consolidating down to one or two major vendors and the opportunity is there for Google Cloud in the marketplace. That being said, as public cloud use increases, we will see the market shift from simply grabbing the greenfield of cloud users to one that is increasingly competitive. Google is certainly looking at the challenges of going up against AWS, with its VMware partnership, and Microsoft Azure and the associated services, as well as others such as IBM and Oracle.

Diane Greene did a great job getting Google Cloud to this point, and now Thomas Kurian has an opportunity to build quickly and firmly on this foundation. Google finds itself in an interesting place in the market as it faces the leadership position of Amazon and Microsoft, and pushes to accelerate traction in the enterprise. One of Diane's priorities at Google was to build a partner ecosystem as she did at VMware. Google has managed partnerships with the likes of SAP, but I believe Google was expecting more pull from strategic partners at this point.

With what has become the dominant IT event of the calendar, AWS re:Invent keeps customers and partners excited and competitors on their toes with new announcements. But what should we expect from AWS at the show this year? I have a new video blog, discussing what I think will be the two keys areas for AWS, Cloud Services and Hybrid. Please watch the video below for my thoughts and predictions for AWS re:Invent 2018.

IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat has been termed a “game changer” by many, but what is the real impact of this deal? Where will the acquisition have a significant impact and where will the combination be less effective? I've written up a new brief for our ESG subscribers about the IBM/Red Hat deal.

In summary, while the deal is significant in scope, the near-term impacts will be limited by the lack of existing synergies in the combined product portfolio. This acquisition helps IBM’s position in the hybrid cloud market significantly but doesn’t enable it to leapfrog competitors like Microsoft, AWS, or Google. The biggest opportunity for IBM is in the container and Kubernetes space, especially if on-premises and bare metal containers become popular. The new IBM would be very well positioned for that type of cloud.

NetApp’s 2018 Insight event was nothing if not engaging: not just for what this vendor is doing (in a traditional announcement and product sense), but for what it is rapidly becoming (in terms of its place in the burgeoning information-based-world).

Of course, NetApp’s impressive – and continuing – recovery and re-formation is only possible because of its excellent execution over the last few years: Focus, finances, and futures have been the emphases, and they are paying off. Take a look at ESG’s On Location video to get a feel for this year’s event and some key takeaways.  

I recently attended the GitHub Universe event in San Francisco, where the word's leading software development platform laid out the future for developers worldwide. The reach and scope of GitHub really was on display at the show, with over 1 billion contributions from the community this year, 8 million new developers, and the fact that 80% of GitHub users are outside the US.  

I recently attended Juniper’s NXTWORK 2018 event in sunny Las Vegas. Well, I assume it was sunny--as most of these events go, most of my time was spent in the convention center. Juniper has had a number of key additions to its executive team since last year and we are now starting to see the results of those shifts. Most noticeable this year was the focus on enterprise customers and enabling them to drive operational efficiency into their multi-cloud environments.

Last week saw the 2018 Hitachi Vantara NEXT conference. For those of you not following along closely, Hitachi Vantara is the artist previously known as, well, many other things...!

One of the ongoing challenges the company faces (both for itself, and indeed to a greater extent when we consider it in association with its Hitachi parent) is how to describe its panoply of abilities, both IT and otherwise, in a cohesive manner.