enterprise

Google’s Enterprise Ambitions – Google Cloud Next ’17 Report

Krishnan Subramanian · March 14, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Even though Google is one of the pioneers in Cloud Computing, they were late to enter the enterprise market. In the last couple of years, they started focussing on enterprise customers and, in the recent Google Cloud Next Conference at San Francisco, they showcased their determination to go after the enterprise market. Compared to last year, this year’s event was a big affair with a slew of announcements on new products and features being the highlight of the event.

Targeting the enterprise

In this conference, Google tried to appease enterprise customers by attempting to speak the language they like to listen. Whether it is talking about multi-cloud or partnering with SAP or talking about the engineering support options, Google tried to appeal to enterprises moving to cloud. One of the criticisms about Google Cloud was they appeal to vendors like Snapchat and Evernote but not much to traditional enterprises. They tried to negate this by lining up vendors like HSBC, Colgate, Schlumberger, Disney, The Home Depot, etc.. Listening to all these customers, I saw a common thread on their interest with Google Cloud. It is about the potential for Machine Learning workloads aided by powerful big data offerings from Google.

Google’s enterprise push focussed on

Large datacenter footprint: They announced support for new regions worldwide such as California, Montreal, and Netherlands.
Security: With the announcement of Identity Aware Proxy and Data Loss Prevention API, along with making other security features in GA, Google is promising enterprises that they can trust Google cloud.
Infrastructure reliability: Google highlighted 99.999 percent uptime to give confidence to enterprise customers on the robustness of their infrastructure. Rishidot Research strongly advises their clients to focus on resiliency in their application architectures rather than worry about infrastructure reliability.

I have long been advocating that Google’s path to relevance in the cloud is through Machine Learning and AI. I heard the same from various enterprise customers in this conference. One of Google’s strengths is in big data and, with the announcements related to Machine Learning, they are positioning themselves as the go-to cloud for ML workloads. Google’s machine learning engine and Google Vision API is now generally available. As a part of Vision API, Google is exposing the metadata as a service so that it helps app developers to use the API to gain Google Photos like detection capabilities. This along with the Video Intelligence API puts them as the top cloud destination for ML and AI workloads. Expect to see more startups and enterprises flocking Google Cloud for their ML and AI needs.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Data Center investments is their asset and the fact that their regions are connected by a private network gives them an edge and enterprise credentials
Machine Learning and AI are their strengths and will give them an edge over both AWS and Azure
Google is well positioned to offer the best in class security with their assets and expertise. But jury is out on whether it is enough to convince enterprise customers

Weakness

They are yet to gain widespread enterprise traction. We would love to see customers moving “all in” with Google cloud
Even though they have beefed up Google App Engine, it is yet to attract significant attention
Their multi-cloud pitch shows their weakness in the cloud market. Even though multi-cloud is fast becoming a reality, a public cloud provider using the pitch in high decibels is more indicative of their challenges in the market
They are still in a weak spot compared to AWS when it comes to Functions as a Service. After seeing the success of all the AWS Lambda sessions in the last re:invent, I expected Google to come out swinging. Even though their announcement regarding Firebase integration with Google Cloud Functions offers promise, they have a long way to go before they can catch up with AWS Lambda

Opportunities

Even though AWS has the runaway lead, the infrastructure market is huge and tons of legacy targets available for both Microsoft and Google. Google is positioning themselves to gain significant portion of the remaining cloud market
With the success of Tensorflow in the community, Google has the potential to attract a significant share of Machine Learning workloads. With their advantages in AI, they have an opportunity to become the cloud of choice for not just ML and AI focussed startups but also the enterprise customers
Their inter-region network and security focus will help them gain credibility with the enterprises

Threats

Google’s go to market strategy to attract enterprise customers is still not very convincing. Yes, Google cloud’s top leadership is packed with proven enterprise leaders from VMware, Red Hat, etc. but there is a lack of clarity on their approach. They are neither taking the AWS approach to enterprise customers nor taking a traditional enterprise path. They seem to be playing a middle ground and it runs the risk of not being attractive enough for enterprises
I love their Engineering Support announcement and how they are trying to incorporate AI into customer success. But some of the requirements for their support model could be upsetting the enterprise customers and may come back to bite them. I fully understand why these requirements are needed from a support logistics point of view but we will have to wait and see if it works

Conclusion

Google has started its journey to lure enterprise customers to their cloud. They are definitely growing up in this path but they still have to go a long way before emerging as a strong player. The next two years will be critical for Google Cloud to convince enterprises to trust their cloud. The key to their success lies in convincing enterprises that they are the destination for most of their workloads than giving a message that they are one of the providers in the multi-cloud era. We will have to wait and watch whether they can be a credible contender to AWS and Azure

Competitors

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, Oracle Cloud, Digital Ocean

Disclosure: Google paid for my travel and stay during the conference

SWOT Analysis Source: https://github.com/rishidot/SWOT/blob/master/Google/Google-Cloud.md

Briefing Notes: CloudFabrix AppDimensions

Krishnan Subramanian · February 16, 2016 · Leave a Comment

In this briefing note, we will talk about CloudFabrix AppDimensions Platform. CloudFabrix is a new startup that is launching at the CiscoLive conference going on in Berlin. The founders of CloudFabrix are the same group of people who launched Cloupia and sold it to Cisco in 2012 (Disclaimer: I was an advisor to the executive team of Cloupia at the time).

Market Overview

As organizations steer their way through digital transformation embracing the idea of Modern Enterprise, they are using the Microservices architecture for developing modern cloud native applications. Even though Microservices is still at its infancy in terms of enterprise adoption, companies like Amazon and Netflix has shown shown a path for other organizations to follow. Along with other architecture and infrastructure challenges organizations may face in their push towards Microservices, application governance is a critical need.

Any enterprise embracing Microservices without a proper strategy for governance will increase their risk manyfold, resulting in a lower ROI with enterprise modernization. For small organizations with 50 or less Microservices, governance can be easily managed without any need for specialized tools but large organizations are going to be looking at several hundreds (or even thousands) of Microservices and, possibly, with a good mix of legacy applications. It is important for these organizations to use a standardized platform for application governance that could manage both the breadth and depth of their stack. Governance as a Platform is already a talking point among the CIOs and there are a few vendors who are trying to tackle this space.

Cloudfabrix AppDimensions Overview

CloudFabrix is a new entrant in the Governance as a Platform space and are trying to define a new category called GPaaS (Governance Platform as a Service). CloudFabrix AppDimensions is a platform for enterprise modernization where they define the application in terms of multiple governance related dimensions and then use this categorization to implement organization-wide digital governance (see the image below). This platform bridges the traditional and digital world, giving organizations seamless outcomes and insights driven governance, using Blueprints and through service discovery and data driven intelligence.

In the following section, we will do a SWOT analysis on their platform. This analysis is based on the demo they showed during the briefing session.

Strengths:

The platform solves a more critical need for any organization embracing digital transformation by bridging the legacy world with modern cloud native applications
Ability to enforce governance across the entire application stack
Platform is capable of enabling the “social graph” for Microservices
Multi – Cloud support

Weakness:

Lack of standardization in the industry around Microservices governance puts burden on the startup but it is also an opportunity to establish themselves in a thought leadership position
The imperative is on the company to carve out a new space related to governance

Opportunities:

At this point, the space is not crowded with very few players.in the space. Once Microservices adoption in the enterprise increase, there will be a stronger demand for such a platform and there is an exit opportunity as larger vendors try to jump into the space
Since they are one of the early movers in the space with other competing startups, they have a good opportunity to grab a significant portion of the market pie

Threats:

As it is the case with any startup trying to carve a new space, larger vendors will jump in once they see the opportunity. It is a threat as well as an opportunity for CloudFabrix.

Competitors: Apcera, Weaveworks, Sysdig

Observations from Cloud Connect Chicago

lmacvittie · September 17, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Last week saw the inauguration of CloudConnect Chicago and it was great to see both established and newer speakers taking the stage. The event felt a lot like the inaugural event in Santa Clara; more intimate, more buy-side than sell-side, and of course a focus on cloud.

Some general observations from the event:

SDN is BUBBLING into CLOUD

It’s not necessarily an overt message, but it’s there. SDN – or at least it’s core "decouple and abstract" premise – is definitely rising through the layers of cloud. Speaking to ProfitBricks, for example, showed the way in which the assumptions we draw upon to design L2 architectures may be the most disrupted by SDN while the L3 (IP) network architecture might remain largely untouched. While many vendors are approaching SDN with new L3 architectures and protocols, ProfitBricks has run with the idea that the same "decouple and abstract" premise of SDN that provides value up the stack can also provide significant advantages down the stack.

Given that many of the challenges SDN is designed to address are more pronounced in cloud computing environments than traditional data centers, this is no surprise. SDN is currently quickly moving up the stack in terms of hype, so expect to see at least marketing in the cloud computing demesne start to take advantage of its somewhat nebulous definition as well.

CLOUD CONFUSION CONTINUES

There is still a lot of confusion attached to the word "cloud" on the buy-side, especially when prefixed by modifiers like "private" "public" and "hybrid". Customers are being inundated with self-serving definitions that, while based loosely on NIST definitions, are outside what most experts would consider at least typical. Even associated terms like "elasticity", long considered a staple benefit of cloud, are being stretched thin to include processes that clearly fall outside the implied definition of "just in time" flexible capacity.

Faster provisioning and reducing operational complexity resonated well, however, no matter how far afield the definition of cloud might have gotten. The notion of scheduled elasticity fits with these interests, as enterprises desire the flexibility of cloud as a way to address periodic (and anticipated) increases in capacity needs without maintaining and incurring the costs of an over-provisioned infrastructure.

IDENTITY and ACCESS CONTROL

There continues to be awareness of the issues surrounding identity and access control, particularly as it applies to SaaS, and the need to integrate such services with existing data center processes. While adoption of IaaS remains less broad, SaaS usage is continuing to expand with a significant majority of customers taking advantage of SaaS in some aspect of business and operations. This is leading to an increased awareness of the potential risks and challenges for managing access to these systems, incurring a desire in customers to reassert their governance.

Anticipate the arrival of turn-key solutions in the form of cloud brokers that streamline managing identity and access control for SaaS in the near future as demand continues to escalate in the face of continued SaaS adoption.

If you missed the event, you can enjoy the keynote presentations online.

Announcing Our Enterprise Buyer Services

Krishnan Subramanian · August 3, 2012 · Leave a Comment

After we launched Rishidot Research in April, we got busy running a successful conference, DeployCon 2012, and we hired some big guns for our team. Now we are turning our attention to publishing valuable research content. Our first report will be out on Monday, August 6th 2012. Before we release our first report, I want to talk about how we are going to share our research content and various services offered to enterprise buyers. In a world where there is a term for everything, I can call our model freeregmium (yeah, I know it is lousy). Let me explain how it works below.

We have a three tiered structure for our content access:

Free Access: All our blog posts can be read without even logging into our website. It is open to public. We will talk about what we see in the industry on various topics we focus at Rishidot Research.
Registered Access: We will offer short 1-2 page reports (we call them Alerts) for free but it will be available for registered users of our system (registration page will be available on Monday). We will not share or sell your email address to anyone. In exchange for free access to part of our research library we request you that you participate in strictly optional survey 2-3 times a year. All the content available in this tier will be made available freely for public access (Free Access tier) after six months.
Premium Access: This section will offer full access to our research library. This is for our paid customers (see various plans below). It will include access to all the research reports which we will publish regularly. All the content in this tier will be made available freely for public access (Free Access tier) after one year.

We believe that information should be made available for free so that anyone can access our content. However, all our analysts have to make a living and we need to monetize our content. We feel the above FreeRegMium model will help us monetize and, also, make content freely available (eventually). We have borrowed this business model from the Open Source world where some network security products tapped into the delayed free access model as a way to monetize. At the same time, I want to assure you that we will have good amounts of free content available along with premium content.

Our enterprise buyer side services include:

Research Reports, Insights, Notes, Vendor/Product evaluations (Subscription and On-Demand)
Deep dive advisory on our research publications
Advisory on enterprise IT/Biz needs, vendor evaluations, trend spotting,
On-Site workshops and training

We offer three different tiers of services for enterprise buyers depending on the size of their organization. We will also offer a custom plan but you have to contact our sales team with your requirements.

Research Subscription: This plan is suitable for enterprise buyers who want access to our research reports. We will be publishing our research regularly on our website. Subscribers to this plan will have unlimited access to all our research reports (both free and premium reports). They will have access to premium webinars which may be offered with some of the reports. This plan will also give the subscribers access to report author to discuss the content of the research reports. The price of this plan is $5000 per year.
SME Plan: This tier is for smaller organizations or smaller teams within large enterprises. We offer analyst access to a maximum of two individuals. This plan includes access to our premium research library, unlimited email inquiries, unlimited 30 minute calls/virtual meetings (within a reasonable limit and based on analyst availability). On-site visits, workshops and training are available at a discounted price. The price of this plan is $10,000 per year.
Large Enterprise Plan: This tier is for large organizations with analyst access to greater than five individuals. This plan includes access to our premium research library, unlimited email inquiries, unlimited 30 minute calls/virtual meetings (within a reasonable limit and based on analyst availability). One day on-site visit included (travel and stay expenses separate). This on-site visit can be used for advisory, workshops and training. Additional on-site visits are available at a discounted price. The price of this plan is $20,000 per year.

If you are an enterprise buyer interested in knowing more about our services or purchasing the above services, please contact the sales team. For those organizations who want to avail our services on an one-time basis, we have some hourly plans available. Please contact our sales team with your needs.