Blogs

I’m honored to be a part of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) as lead analyst for observability, IT operations, and sustainability in IT.  Previously, I was publisher and VP of market insights for infrastructure at ESG’s parent organization, TechTarget. In that role, I worked with hundreds of IT vendors’ leadership teams helping them leverage original market insights to improve their go-to-market results. Throughout that time, one consistent observation I had was that the content and insights that came from Enterprise Strategy Group were both more insightful and higher performing than content that came from other analyst groups -- big ones you’ve heard of -- because ESG always brought “the bigger truth” to light. And that truth was being illuminated by industry heavyweights -- people like Jon Oltsik and Adam Demattia -- who are amongst the smartest and most effective people I’ve ever worked with in their respective domains. 

There are a few ways to do a three-scoop ice cream order. You can commit to one flavor because it’s your favorite, it’s reliable, and you don’t like mixing flavors. You can get two scoops of your favorite flavor and one of a different flavor; this option allows you to stay loyal to your favorite flavor but also enjoy some variety. Or you can get all three different flavors, balancing the uniqueness of each, how they complement each other, and the different strengths and weaknesses they each have. Ok, maybe I’m looking a little too deeply into ice cream ordering, but this is how organizations are thinking when allocating workloads to cloud environments. While sticking to what they know may feel safer and more straightforward, sometimes the risk of mixing clouds (or flavors!) is worth the reward.

Wrapping up the cloud convention year, with this year's re:Invent conference -- followed by a massive outage in AWS' US-EAST-1 region -- I decided it was time for a deep dive on a few of the cloud provider's recent announcements, particularly from an IaaS and PaaS perspective. See the quick-hit video with myself and Scott Sinclair below and the link to the longer blog over on TechTarget.

As many of you know, I recently left AWS. We are just a few days away from AWS re:invent getting started. The flood of announcements that have been coming out has been fast and furious this week. Honestly, I look forward to the announcements from the week before and the week after re:invent. This might surprise you, but my feeling is that the true innovation coming out of AWS is from some of the smaller services that don’t get the airtime of an Amazon S3, EC2, or EBS.

You might be asking, so what is going to be announced that gets you excited? Unfortunately, I cannot go into any of that till after next week or they will kill me (or at least sue me). But here are a few things, call them trends, that were talked about in the last two weeks that are interesting to me. You also might be very surprised that some of these “features” did not exist before. Many IT organizations can be surprised by assuming these features exist already. AWS definitely needs to “raise the bar” when it comes to explaining a few of these services and what's on the truck.

Did you know: Almost 90% of organizations leverage multiple cloud service providers?

Having just joined ESG from Amazon Web Services, this is not surprising to me. Did it surprise you? It shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Talking with 1000s of enterprises of all different sizes, different verticals, and different application stacks over the past, I have heard many legitimate reasons for using more than one cloud service provider (CSP). But I am getting ahead of myself, let me introduce myself.

Listen in as Bob Laliberte and I discuss these two important research topics and capture technology and business insights into the future of the data center.

Distributed Cloud is a connected ecosystem of cloud services, developer-ready infrastructure, and legacy IT that provides consistent operations for modern applications.

Digital Ecosystems: How carriers, Telcos, MSPs, and CSPs are innovating and optimizing edge computing applications.  

Listen in as Bob Laliberte and I discuss these two important research topics:

Distributed Cloud is a connected ecosystem of cloud services, developer-ready infrastructure, and legacy IT that provides consistent operations for modern applications.

Observability from Code to Cloud: Optimizing cloud-native application architectures via AIOps-driven automation and FinOps cost optimization.

Listen in as Scott Sinclair and I discuss these two important research topics and capture technology and business insights into the future of the data center.

One may think that the pace of cloud innovation and changing consumption models have simplified life for IT professionals. However, ESG's annual Technology Spending Intentions Survey highlighted that 75% of organizations believe IT complexity has increased over the last 2 years. Dell Technologies World was packed with announcements and information to help IT professionals address this complexity and transform operations. Listen in as Mark Peters, Practice Director; Kevin Rhone, Director ESG Channel Acceleration; Scott Sinclair, ESG Senior Analyst; and I share our thoughts on the event and the potential Dell is creating with Apex.

Doug Cahill and I had the opportunity to discuss some of the operating dynamics in today's IT organizations and how the pressure of embracing cloud innovation is creating the opportunity for distributed cloud environments. What is distributed cloud? Simply put, distributed cloud is a connected ecosystem of cloud services, developer-ready infrastructure, and legacy IT that provides consistent operations for modern applications. Listen in as Doug and I explore the importance of distributed cloud and its potential impact in the market.