Private cloud business models are taking lessons from the public clouds enabling enterprises to try a proof-of-concept as OpEx before investing in CapEx.
We had an interesting virtual presentation this morning by executives from Inifidat, the provider of enterprise data and cloud storage solutions as part of the IT Press Tour #34.
Moshe Yanai, CEO kicked off the presentation with an observation on how COVID-19 will affect enterprise IT spending. Price leaders have a competitive advantage in storage during periods
of financial uncertainty. Enterprises cannot stop consuming storage; however, they can and will slow down greenfield projects. There will be extreme CFO scrutiny of big-ticket line items as well as an increased willingness to take calculated risks in search of cost savings. Premium brands will lose share of wallet to price leaders and the share gains made by price leaders will persist indefinitely, if you also deliver quality.
In a recent use case, the Italian Ministry of Banking advised employees to begin working from home. This created an immediate need for additional storage capacity. The client did not have the budget for additional hardware and was able to take advantage of Infinidat’s capacity-on-demand consumption model that enabled employees to work from home seamlessly during the pandemic. A retail customer in Sweden is consolidating 18 storage arrays into 1 (18:1) to save on infrastructure and real estate.
Symmetrix’s storage product propelled EMC from CAP worth of $10 million U.S. in 1990 to more than $200 billion (20X increase) in U.S. dollars in 2000. Infinidat may disrupt the data storage world and public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) the same way with even greater success.
Eran Brown, CTO EMEA posited that the U.S. CLOUD Act that requires all major U.S. cloud providers to turn over any requested information to federal agencies completely violates the data sovereignty of E.U. member states. Because this is happening in cyberspace, it’s not treated as an act of war but it’s a huge problem with regards to GDPR and other privacy requirements.
Eran is seeing banks, financial services, and e-commerce retailers expanding their private clouds to ensure their ability to meet data privacy requirements that the CLOUD Act prevents.
This is leading to a change in procurement where the current scenario involves: approval > procure > ship > install > configure > measure business volume and is evolving to the public cloud model of approve > measure business value > invoice. Current business models require an expensive three-year commitment when growth is neither transparent or instantaneous. While enterprises prefer CapEx to OpEx they want to know if the investment will pay out prior to making the CapEx commitment. The new business model helps enterprises be more agile with their infrastructure.
Yair Cohen, V.P. of Products continued the presentation with observations of the new approaches that are needed for digital transformation initiatives to succeed. Relieve bottlenecks from legacy technology. Follow product design principles with a seamless infrastructure that’s easy to manage, easy to procure, and easy to support. Scale seamlessly with online data mobility. Use machine learning and a neural cache to collect metadata to make sophisticated decisions about data management. Lastly a single pane of glass that provides trends, insights, and proactive system health reports to mitigate support escalations.
Vicky Glynn, Head of Product at BrightSolid, a hybrid cloud MSP in Scotland helping clients design, build, and manage hybrid multi-cloud solutions to solve business problems. Cloud is the solution that drives transformation with data and analytics, AI/ML, robotics, et al. Vicky referenced a study by RightScale where 67% of government organizations report they are pursuing digital transformation initiatives but only 5% are achieving their goals. She recommends 1) focusing on business outcomes; 2) being reliable and maintaining a service orientation; 3) identify the appropriate place to store data based on how it will be used; 4) evaluate to determine the right mix between value and cost; and, 5) get members of the team up to speed with the knowledge and skills necessary to manage and maintain your hybrid multi-cloud solution.