Avi Networks today announced Universal Service Mesh, adding what it claims are two major enhancements to the Avi Vantage Platform as part of a cunning plan to corner a $12 billion market for application services.
Avi is gets enhanced, full-featured, ingress and gateway services to Istio to facilitate secure connectivity for Kubernetes applications across multiple clusters, regions, or clouds. These include L4-L7 traffic management, security including WAF, and observability.
Node4, the UK-based cloud, data centre and communications provider, has launched its Services Gateway.
Designed to help customers realise the value of digital transformation, the Services Gateway allows them access IT infrastructure and solutions. All solutions are underpinned by Node4’s end-to-end infrastructure including tier 3+ data centres, core network, cloud and collaboration platforms.
The Services Gateway also allows Node4 customers to benefit from hybrid solutions, supported by partners including Office365, AWS and Microsoft Azure to make sure that applications and workloads are on the most efficient infrastructure.
Paul Bryce, Chief Commercial Officer, Node4 said: “Node4’s history of owning and running data centres, including our cloud platform, gives customers the option to either host with us physically or in the cloud. It gave us the pedigree to then build our network, on which we can now offer customers a gateway to leverage multiple services across the Node4 portfolio as well as other providers.”
“Our Services Gateway supports customers in placing their workloads on the right infrastructure while maintaining control, backups, continuity and security,” he said.
The Services Gateway allows customers to easily transition to a digital environment, without the risk or costs associated with making all legacy equipment redundant at once. By taking a customer’s legacy hardware and moving it into Node4’s environment, customers can access new services alongside their existing infrastructure.
Node4 can also support customers that want to modernise legacy applications.
Bryce said: “Node4 can work with customers, developers and application support teams to review existing applications and see if they are suitable for containerisation. Containerising legacy applications not only allows customers to deploy applications on modern operating systems and infrastructure such as the Node4 Cloud but it supports a reduction of on-premise legacy server footprint, by removing the requirement to support old hardware and out of support operating systems.”
Increasing demand for Cloud-based services has seen a further four resellers join Advanced’s partner programme TruePartner, since its launch in February this year.
Minerva UK, Deans Computer Services, HBP and BME Solutions have all demonstrated their commitment to helping SME customers transition to the Cloud.
Rewarding resellers for their Cloud-first strategy, TruePartner claims to provide “disruptive yet focused” Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions the channel can use to engage new customers.
Dean McGlone, Channel Director at Advanced, said: “Resellers are starting to see the breadth of opportunities the Cloud can deliver, and this is exemplified by the four new partners that have joined our TruePartner programme. We’ve found that an overwhelming number of SMEs across the country want to embrace the Cloud, but many lack the knowledge and experience to make the transition confidently. In fact, according to our research, just 33 per cent admit to being experienced in the Cloud.
“As part of TruePartner, each reseller is supported in delivering genuine Cloud solutions to their customers, while harnessing the benefits of a Cloud subscription service, from recurring revenue to client retention and acquisition. We’re continuing to see a need for Financial Management Solutions (FMS), but SMEs are increasingly demanding Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which can be delivered with our Business Cloud Essentials solution.”
Advanced said n the SME community is “vocal” about the need for better support when it comes to transitioning to the Cloud. Advanced claims that a massive 88 percent of business leaders think Cloud providers need to do more to build confidence in the Cloud.
Jo Dixon, Managing Director at HBP, said: “We recognise that moving to the Cloud is not only right for our customers, but it also’s right for us and we’re looking to adapt quickly. Advanced is fully supporting the traditional reseller channel in its transformation to adopt the Cloud, proving to be the right partner for us.”
Patrick Clayton, Managing Director at Deans Computer Services PLC, stated “There’s a growing pace of shift to the Cloud, based on the huge benefits to end users. Our new partnership with Advanced gives us the opportunity to support businesses with their transformation, giving them a fully integrated, true Cloud ERP solution with all the advantages that offers.”
John Chadwick, Managing Director at Minerva, said: “Minerva has been in business for 35 years. Over that period, we have cultivated a portfolio of “best of breed” applications which were designed primarily for on-premise situations and we have serviced that requirement from both our Applications software and our Networking teams.
The market is moving, be it conservatively, towards Cloud alternatives and we have been searching for some time for a suitable Cloud partnership. We are confident Business Cloud Essentials now fills that void, and we intend to embrace the opportunity.”
Beancounters at the analyst firm Gartner have added up some numbers and divided them by their collective neck size and worked out that the worldwide public cloud revenue market is forecast to grow 17 percent to $206 billion in 2019.
This year is expected to see revenues in the market hit $176 billion – an increase of 21 percent from 2017.
Big G said Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the dominant segment in the public cloud market, with Gartner predicting revenues will grow 17.8 per cent to reach $85 billion in 2019.
The analyst said SaaS will maintain this market dominance over the next four years and generate global revenues of $113 billion by 2022.
Craig Roth, research vice president at Gartner, said that the increasing adoption of SaaS applications and other cloud services affects the management, dissemination and exploitation of enterprise content.
“Organisations are steadily – but not exclusively – shifting their content environments to SaaS. Gartner expects that by 2019, the current enterprise content management market will devolve into purpose-built, cloud-based content solutions and solution services applications.”
Cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the market, predicted to reach $39.5 billion next year, representing a 27.6 percent increase from $31 billion in 2018. By 2022, Gartner expects that 90 percent of organisations will buy their public cloud IaaS from an integrated IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider.
How SaaSy can you get?
Analyst outfit Gartner has highlighted growth in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS next year. There’s a real future in aaS.
After shuffling its collective tarot cards Big G decided that 2019 will deliver a 17.3 percent increase in public cloud services, which will follow on from an expected 21 per cent growth in 2018.
The majority of that growth in spending will be directed towards Infrastructure as a Service offerings but the analyst house is expecting that 90 percent of the customers who go for IaaS will do so from a provider that can also provide Platform as a Service.
Sid Nag, research director at Gartner said: “Demand for integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings is driving the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption.”
“We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organizations will demand offerings with more breadth and depth for their hybrid environments. Already, strategic initiatives such as digital transformation projects resulting in the adoption of multicloud and hybrid cloud fuel the growth of the IaaS market”, he added.
SaaS is also still an area expecting growth with Gartner forecasting 17.8 percent improvements in revenue next year.
Silhouette Men Wearing Suits And Hats
The top 10 public cloud providers are getting bigger and will have rather a lot of influence and power in the IaaS space, according to analyst outfit Gartner.
The market leaders will grow their market share to 70 percent this year, according to Gartner, which has warned against the industry’s top players gaining an “unchecked influence” on the IaaS space.
Public cloud revenues will jump by 21 percent year on year in 2018, pushing total sales to $186.4 billion.
The fastest-growing segment of the market remains infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), claims Gartner, which is forecast to grow 36 percent to total $40.8 billion in sales in 2018.
The most lucrative segments cloud application services (SaaS), which is set to generate $73.6 billion in revenues in the same time frame. By 2021, SaaS is expected to make up 45 percent of the entire cloud market.
Gartner also found that despite an increasing number of firms moving into the cloud space, the top 10 public cloud giants are set to swell their market share from 50 percent in 2016 to 70 percent by 2021.
Research director at Gartner Sid Nag said that while a buoyant market creates enormous opportunities for end users, firms should be wary of the increasing dominance of hyperscale IaaS providers.
“While [cloud] enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organisations need to be cautious about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market,” he said.
“Although these large vendors have different strengths, and customers feel comfortable that they will be able to meet their current and future needs, other database-as-a-service (dbPaaS) offerings may be good choices for organisations looking to avoid lock-in.”
Gartner Group has been shuffling its tarot cards and reached the conclusion that worldwide public cloud services continue to rise, which will reach $260 billion for the year 2017.
The market research firm said that strong SaaS and IaaS performance is driving growth for the calendar year. The latest report projected the market to grow by 18.5 per cent year-on-year to total $260.2 billion, up from $219.6 billion last year.
Gartner research director Sid Nag said the final data for 2016 showed that software as a service (SaaS) revenue was far greater in 2016 than expected, reaching $48.2 billion.
“SaaS is also growing faster in 2017 than previously forecast, leading to a significant uplift in the entire public cloud revenue forecast.”
He said: “Strategic adoption of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings is also outperforming previous expectations, as enterprise-scale organizations are increasingly confident that PaaS will be their primary form of application development platform in the future. This accounts for the remainder of the increase in this iteration of Gartner’s public cloud services revenue forecast.”
SaaS revenue is expected to grow 21 percent in 2017 to reach $58.6 billion, as the acceleration in SaaS adoption can be explained by providers delivering nearly all application functional extensions and add-ons as a service.
The highest revenue growth will come from cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is projected to grow 36.6 percent in 2017 to reach $34.7 billion.
Gartner still expects growth to even out from 2018 onwards, because it has obtained mainstream status and maturity. Gartner expects 70 percent of public cloud services revenue to be dominated by the top 10 public cloud providers through 2021.
Gartner is forecasting an uptake in public cloud spending and IaaS is going to be the main winner.
It looks like resellers that have taken the effort to specialise in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are going to be laughing all the way to the bank for the next year or so.
Beancounters at Big G say that IaaS as the main area to benefit from a general upswing in customer spending on public cloud services.
They expect worldwide spending on public cloud services to increase by 18 per cent this year, which equates to $246.8 billion.
The IaaS market is expected to grow by 36.8 percent with SaaS not too far behind with a 20.1 percent. The SaaS market is expected to slow a bit quicker because it is further along in the maturity cycle and a lot of customers are already using HR and sales applications in the cloud.
Customer attitudes towards public cloud have improved as firms like Amazon have been successful at promoting the idea of putting data onto their platforms. Sid Nag, research director at Gartner said that while fears about security are still out there but there is also a pressure towards digital transformation strategies and an acceptance from most users that the public cloud will play some role in their future.
“The overall global public cloud market is entering a period of stabilization, with its growth rate peaking at 18% in 2017 and then tapering off over the next few years,” he said .
“While some organizations are still figuring out where cloud actually fits in their overall IT strategy, an effort to cost optimize and bring forth the path to transformation holds strong promise and results for IT outsourcing (ITO) buyers. Gartner predicts that through 2020, cloud adoption strategies will influence more than half of IT outsourcing deals,” he added.
Although he is not backward about coming forward at the best of times, Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison has been talking up his outfit’s Cloud business lately, claiming it is doing rather well because if its SaaS presence.
Ellison claims Oracle’s cloud business is “defying conventional wisdom” by accelerating while it expands and this is because of its presence in the SaaS market where rivals are not competing.
“We think we have a fighting chance to be the first SaaS company to make it to $10 billion in annual revenue,” Ellison said.
Oracle is a number two SaaS vendor and had a total SaaS and PaaS revenue of $2.2 billion during fiscal 2016, up 49 percent from the year before. The top SaaS vendor, Salesforce made $6.67 billion in 2016 and expects its 2017 revenue to be $8.08 billion.
Public cloud IaaS leader Amazon Web Services said in April that it’s on track to hit $10 billion in revenue this year.
The cloud accounted for around eight percent of Oracle’s quarterly revenue, but this business to continue growing even faster in Oracle’s fiscal 2017.
Ellison also said Oracle is seeing “a huge amount of demand” for IaaS from its existing SaaS and database customers, which wish to avoid the data migration costs associated with AWS and other cloud vendors.
Oracle has made significant data centre efficiency advancements and can now offer lower costs, better security and superior reliability than any other provider in the market, he added.
The use of Software as a Service (SaaS) by enterprises is becoming “mission critical”, according to a survey by IT market research company Gartner.
Gartner said that cost and agility are the main reasons for SaaS cloud adoption by enterprises, based on a survey involving four countries in four regions around the world.
Joanne Correia, a research VP at Gartner, said that the most common reasons for using SaaS were to develop and test production and mission-critical workloads.
“We’ve seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation and email,” she said.
Of those surveyed, 44 percent thought overall cost reduction was the main reason for investment in SaaS. But CIOs and senior IT project managers rated adoption not only because of cost but because of operational agility and giving their businesses an advantage over competitors.
Gartner believes that few enterprises will completely migrate to SaaS and instead will mix that with traditional on premises deployment.
Outside of the USA, many enterprises still worry about security, privacy and “fear of government snooping”.
Traditional on premise deployments will shrink from 34 percent in 2014 to 18 percent by 2017.
A major Chinese IT player – Tencent Cloud – has signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with IBM to bring Software as a Service (SaaS) for various industries.
Both firms will concentrate on emerging small and medium enterprises in healthcare and other fields.
Tencent Holdings is one of the major providers of internet services in mainland China, and its Cloud division sells to enterprises and developers a number of offerings.
Taosang Tong, a senior executive VP of IBM said: “Tencent has a stable and reliable cloud computing platform, while IBM has abundant industry expertise aimed at the enterprise.”
Nancy Thomas, a managing partner at IBM China said the two companies will bring scale and cost benefits of cloud computing to Chinese enterprises. “The industry dimension makes this especially appealing for businesses,” she said.
Financial considerations were not disclosed.
SaaS firm intY claimed that it has forged a “historic agreement” with the mighty Microsoft related to Office 365. SaaS stands for software as a service.
It will offer what it dubs a recurring revenue resale model to its high volume partners. That means, said intY that its partners can resell rather than just recommend Office 365 – meaning better margins and the ability to sell more services.
Chris Baldock, the chief executive officer of intT, said its major partners had problems with the referral only model. One sticking point was Microsoft’s billing relationship that prevented complementary services being offered by the channel on one invoice.
“This agreement puts our larger channel partners firmly back in the driving seat. They become a reseller with margin and value add.”
Customer adoption, added Baldock, is pretty much reliant on channel partners for migration, support and integration.
So the firm is adding Office 365 for resale in its CASCADE mix.
HP said that its distributor and partner Westcoast will use its Converged Cloud offering to woo the reseller base.
The investment is over £1 million and will mean Westcoast will offer its resellers cloud services, to manage Microsoft Lync, Exchange and SharePoint in the distributors’ IL3 data centre.
The move, said HP, means that Westcoast customers – that is to say its resellers – will be able to use current credit lines as well as take part in a partner programme which includes training and support.
Duncan Forsyth, Westcoast’s MD said that the era of onsite IT is becoming IT in the cloud. “We want to support both,” he said. HP Converged Cloud will let his company deliver IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (software as a service) for resellers with a minimal need for capital investment.
The system will effectively be based on HP products including Proliant Bladesystem c7000 enclosures with BL460c Gen 8 blades using Intel Xeon chips. The system will also use SoreServ storage systems, HP tape libraries and HP 5400 Switch series.
HP exec Michael Clifford said that managing and using data centres “frighten many resellers” but using its systems will help resellers to see clearly through the mists of the cloud and offer quality cloud services.
Businesses needing to implement new processes and procedures across different sites may well be thanking their lucky stars today, after German software colossus Software AG unveiled something called Process Live.
Process Live is described as “a cloud based service integrating social collaboration with process improvement”, which loosely means that you can put things like your HR services (contracts, hiring and firing) in the cloud and make them available across different territories – rather than locking them away in separate systems where no one can find what they need.
Being software-as-a-service (SaaS), Process Live is intended to offer Software AG’s customers all the usual benefits of scaling up as well as down, instant switching on and off, and so on.
Singapore-based management consultancy firm, the Litmus Group, is using Process Live and Fabian Erbach, Partner at Litmus quoted by Software AG thus: “Process Live gives us the opportunity to start process improvement projects immediately and to dynamically scale them based on demand and maturity.”
“We are giving access to the speed and accuracy of a process driven business to departments and organisations of any size”, said Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost. “With a fully scalable investment model, business users have direct access to powerful process improvement tools when and for how long they need them – without having to involve the IT department.”
The launch of Process Live took place at Software AG’s user conference, Innovation World, which was held in San Francisco.
Market research company IDC has gazed in its crystal ball or inspected a set of entrails and has concluded that worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be worth $47.4 billion this year.
And there’s more to come, according to the auspices. By 2017, spending will reach $107 billion meaning that between then and now sales will grow by 23.5 percent, compounded annually.
The analysts believe that cloud services are blowing into a chapter two phase where mobile, social and big data will become interdependent.
Chief IDC diviner Frank Gens calculates thus: “Over the next several years, the primary driver for cloud adoption will shift from economics to innovation as leading-edge companies invest in cloud services as the foundation for new competitive offerings. The emergence of cloud as the core for new ‘business as a service’ offerings will accelerate cloud adoption and dramatically raise the cloud model’s strategic value beyond CIOs to CXOs of all types.”
Virtual private clouds help to persuade organisations that the cloud is not dangerous but instead has a silver lining.
By 2017, according to Gens, public IT cloud services will account for seventeen percent of IT product spend. Software as a service (SaaS) will keep the biggest chunk of the pie, and account for 59.7 percent of revenues in 2017, while fast growing categories include the dreadfully named “platform as a service” (PaaS) and the almost equally gruesome “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) with compound annual growths of 29.7 percent and 27.2 percent.
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 9th, 2024