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.
During the past 20+ years, discounting bartending in college, I have always been working in the technology space. I have held roles as an IT operator (database administrator, NOC implementation consultant, IT capacity planner, director of storage and disaster recovery), in go-to-market roles (director of technical marketing, director of product marketing, director of sales engineers, vice president of sales), many product roles (product manager, director of product management, SVP of product), a serial startup founding team, and now an analyst.
I started my life after college as an analyst with a small startup firm called Strategic Networks. Speaking in front of 1000s, working on multi-client research studies, white papers, helping to bridge the divide between IT consumer desires and IT vendor capabilities. Fast-forward 20 plus years and I am back at it with a new firm. Albeit with a ton more experience, having built companies that collectively shipped over $1 billion in product and, most importantly, delighted 100s of thousands of customers.
Recently I left AWS, where “working backward” is the most used term. Why, might you ask? Because it is the right way to build products, get in deep, and understand your customers. AWS didn’t invent being customer-centric but did take it to a cult-like status! I have always prided myself on building customer-centric teams, going the distance to metric, and measuring the interactions. I believe that I led my team at Zerto to success, building our customer base from under 3000 to over 8000 customers in just 4 years, with just under 50% using distributed cloud.
Why now, why ESG?
I have had fun building services in the cloud, operating at a hyperscaler scale, and working with 1000s of IT organizations to help them on their digital transformation journeys, but wanted to spread that knowledge more broadly. ESG gives me the platform to share my knowledge to help companies bring to market better products, with focused roadmaps, and tell their story in a language that makes sense to the IT and DevOps communities. Now was the right time, as ESG has become part of the TechTarget family with BrightTalk. The synergies are undeniable.
As many of you know, I am very data-driven. I have been a customer of ESG’s in the past at Akorri, NetApp, HPE, and Zerto because of the quality of research and insights the analysts bring to the table. Not simply counting boxes shipped or reading marketing slides, but also doing first-hand quantitative research to back up the thesis. A great example is 2021 Data Infrastructure Trends, with a chapter that highlights the “Public Cloud Is Becoming the Core of IT.” It brought to light that only about 46% of companies believe that “leveraging on-premises managed services” meets a cloud-first agenda. But 41% are not sure and need help buying into the “superior TCO.” If this is the case and cloud service providers have a better TCO for usability, storage, and compute, why were only 13% saying cloud-first means public cloud?
Many times, it is about the application. Other times it is about instruments that produce the data. And then a lot of the time it has to do with the locality of the data to applications and the end-users of those applications. I am excited and have already started to dig in on my coverage area of distributed multi-cloud and Dev/ITOps. I look forward to producing insights into how, where, and why companies are deploying across multiple clouds. That is one of the answers to the question of why “almost 90% of organizations leverage multiple cloud service providers” or what we call distributed cloud. You might also call it cloud sprawl! Stay tuned to this space.
Let’s take this journey together! Please reach out so we can explore how we answer these complex and important questions!
