modern 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

Research Report: Serverless Architectures – Beginning Of A Trend?

sateesh · February 17, 2016 · Leave a Comment

In this report, we take a look at current state of serverless architectures. We looked at the current activity level of AWS Lambda, Google Firebase and Facebook Parse. Despite their promise, we are at early days of serverless architectures and it is not yet considered mainstream. Read through the report for details ( Recommend viewing in full screen mode ).

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