Wipro is evaluating options to sell data centers

India's third biggest software exporter Wipro is evaluating options to sell data centers and other computer hardware assets of its US subsidiary Infocrossing to unlock value from what the company now calls 'non-core' business.

Wipro has already received initial offers from several medium to large US telcos, and the company is deliberating to carve out five data centres owned by Infocrossing for a potential sale estimated to be worth anywhere between $300 million and $400 million.

Wipro’s thought process –

·         This part of Infocrossing (datacenters) is not a game changer over next three-five years.

·         The idea is more about unlocking value from non-strategic part than giving up the entire Infocrossing unit.

·         Customers do not make decisions based on whether a vendor owns datacenters or not.

-Cheers

Indian IT sector - tighten the belt

Are we moving towards another recession?

The global economic developments after Standard & Poor's (S&P) downgraded the U.S. credit rating, point towards the advent of a global economic meltdown. S&P for the first-time downgraded its long-term sovereign credit rating on the U.S. from 'AAA' to 'AA+' and kept a negative outlook.

The debt ceiling could not prevent the S&P downgrading. The historical downgrading also worsened the word economy which is already on the brink of a recession driven by the weakened U.S. financial recovery and the debt-ridden European economy.

While the debt crisis is likely to hit banking, manufacturing, real-estate and pharmaceutical sectors in the U.S., the crisis is said to cause impact to IT Sector and sectors depending on exports.

It will also result in less capital flow to the Indian economy and capital markets may face more volatility head.

Indian IT sector has also started tightening the belt and getting ready to respond to this unprecedented situation.

-Cheers

Enterprise-class cloud-based data protection : Vaultize

Vaultize  from Anoosmar Tech is an enterprise-class cloud-based data protection that not only provide all the benefits of a typical cloud-based backup over traditional on-premise backup, but also provides numerous other benefits making it superior to any plain cloud-based backup solution.

Vaultize provides flexibility to enterprises in terms of deployment and how to store their data.

·         Cloud — they can choose to deploy Vaultize ―as-is— with no or little modifications — using the secure, scalable and reliable Vaultize cloud

·         Cloud option

·         Cloud Provider — they can choose cloud provider (e.g. AWS, Rackspace) which can be different from Vaultize’s preferred provider

·         Cloud Location — they can choose geographical location of cloud storage from many locations

·         Cloud Storage — they can choose to completely control storage whether it is in Vaultize cloud or cloud of its own

·         Virtual Private Cloud — they can choose to a deployment where the server and storage are dedicated to them and are completely isolated from other customers by making a virtual private cloud

·         On-premise/Hybrid

·         Private Cloud — they can choose to deploy Vaultize within a private cloud that would combine the benefits of high-speed on-premise backup with the advanced features of Vaultize

·         Appliance — they can choose to deploy Vaultize appliance to backup the data which otherwise cannot be moved to cloud for compliance to regulations or legal requirements.

Vaultize pricing is very simple: you pay just a flat fee per GB of backup storage.

·         NO Tier-based charging

·         NO Licensing cost — No additional fee for every device/user in your organization

·         NO Quota per user

-Cheers

Key cloud roadblock – Fear of Change

Key findings from a Study  –

Key cloud roadblock –  Fear of Change

·         Fear of change tends to be underestimated when companies decide to mix things up and take new approaches to tried-and-true ways of doing things. It's not just changing what people do all day in terms of how they use software, like moving to SaaS, but it's also about infrastructure and about application developers and how they think about developing an application.

·         Additional cloud roadblocks

o   Up-front costs

o    Security

Justification for cloud implementation on the other hand still remains the same-

·         Cost reduction

·         Increased flexibility/scalability

·         Reduced complexity

Again as discussed earlier in previous blog- Majority have virtualized their cloud servers, but few have implemented the Core management, Automation and Orchestration or Self-service functionality to use the cloud to its full potential.

-Cheers

High and automated Virtulization is same as Private Cloud?

Many companies have  implemented virtualization in various shapes and forms into existing computing environment.

They have followed the path of standardization of environments, Consolidating servers and datacenters, implementing Virtual servers for Development and Test and DR environments, implementing Virtualization for Production as P2V etc.  are all benefits of having virtualization.

Some also run highly virtualized IT with automation provided by system management solutions. One can imagine that many have already reaped the benefits of virtualization including increased utilization of servers, power savings, reduced server footprint, etc.

The question now comes up - “Is High Virtualization the same as Private Cloud?” or “We are already running a highly virtualized computing today, do we still need private cloud?”

And in many scenarios the answer is  still YES. And it really depends on if the attributes delivered by private cloud are in place already or still needed. This point is that virtualization and private cloud are not the same! There is no question that virtualization is an enabler.

Private cloud is a cloud dedicated to an organization. On premises or hosted by a 3^rd party, private cloud must exhibit the characteristics of cloud computing -  else it is not the CLOUD.  

Specifically, private cloud is expected to deliver 3 key attributes: Automation, Elasticity, and Self-service to differentiate itself from a highly virtualized or automated environment.

You will notice that I do not include ubiquitous access and pay-as-you-go model as key attributes for Private Cloud. These two are not considered as essential due to: for private cloud IT may want more control, instead of allowing ubiquitous access; and the pay-as-you-go or charge-back model simply may not be feasible to implement in an organization.

Without having virtualization in place, cloud will be more a concept than an implementable solution. Nonetheless, without self-service and automatic deployment, it may become cost-prohibitive to implement private cloud. These 3 key attributes convert a virtualization solution into a cloud setting.

-Cheers

IT Companies redraw strategy -

Cognizant –

The U.S. environment post-resolution of debt crisis may push the IT (information technology) companies to look at productivity and investment with a sense of purpose, seriousness and long-term outlook.

The situation as it was evolving would force clients to look for options that give them more for less. Clients invariably worked hard to drive efficiency when chips were down. Still, they needed to support their businesses. Consequently, he felt, clients had to necessarily invest in IT. The challenge lay in discovering - what else can be offered to them. Cognizant had to stay invested in creating newer capacities and offer innovative solutions if it were to increase its business prospects. In this context, it is justified the position taken by Cognizant to keep the operating margin within a 19-20 per cent band and reinvest the balance money.

The emerging environment in the wake of developments especially in the U.S. would force IT companies to work relentlessly on ways to become nimbler, flexible and adaptable. Cognizant would have to expend its energies on re-working utilization levels with newly-defined bench strength, fine-tuning the hiring process and driving resource efficiency in delivery models.

On the rising concerns across the globe over protecting local jobs - IT companies had to make adjustments on this score. Cognizant had gone in for campus recruitments in the U.S. and Europe. We are hiring in every geographical location. We want to be a local service provider to local clients.

Infosys Senior executives –

Maintained their revenue outlook, saying full-year fiscal revenues could grow 18-20 percent to between $7.13 billion and $7.25 billion, which analysts and investors had expected to be higher.

The economic environment is still volatile. All the large markets are seeing problems like high unemployment and inflation, low growth and huge fiscal deficits.
Clients have become cautious, as the sovereign (debt) crisis in Europe has become bigger.

-Cheers

PS: Cheper, Better, Faster...!

Riverbed’s asymmetric optimization strategy

Riverbed Technology has acquired Aptimize Limited & Zeus Technology

The acquisitions of the two companies will form the cornerstone of Riverbed’s asymmetric optimization strategy.

Aptimize's web content optimization is an innovative new technology area that allows customers to deliver both internal web applications, like SharePoint, and external web applications, like e-commerce websites, much faster. The Aptimize Website Accelerator eliminates massive inefficiencies in modern web applications by effectively transforming the content (javascript, cascading style sheets, images, etc.) in real time—instantly accelerating websites or intranets with a simple software installation on the Web server.

No extra hardware, code or browser changes are needed. Organizations that deploy the Aptimize solution have accelerated performance up to 400%. The Aptimize solution is often deployed in tandem with wide area network (WAN) optimization controllers and application delivery controllers (ADCs) to enhance performance.  

Aptimize goes beyond HTTP and TCP optimization and Web content optimization by transforming web content for faster delivery and a more responsive user experience. Aptimize’s technology reorders, merges and resizes content according to who is viewing it and from where. The end result is the application is delivered more effectively—up to four times faster—regardless of the platform used.

Zeus has a suite of application-acceleration and application-management products that fall under its Elastic Application Delivery umbrella, including a very popular load balancer. Leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Joyent all utilize Zeus’ technology to boost performance for their clouds.

Zeus approached product development differently by architecting a software-based [application delivery controller]. As a software-based solution, the Zeus vADC has many advantages over its hardware-originated peers: it is better suited for virtual and cloud environments, it can migrate across environments, and it can scale on demand.

Zeus really brings is the ability to accelerate new types of asymmetric applications, such as e-commerce or other customer-serving web applications. They’re called asymmetric because there aren’t appliances like Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance at both ends to boost performance, which means all the work is done on the application provider’s end.

Riverbed’s main competition are — Cisco and Citrix, primarily — although it has added F5 Networks on the ADC front. Greater market consolidation is expected to follow the Riverbed’s big play, as there are startups like Aryaka* and Infineta waiting in the wings with interesting technologies.

And Cisco, of course, could buy Citrix and/or F5 as it looks to reorganize around its strengths.

*Part of My watch list from last year…!

-Cheers

Low Cost IT will prevail...

As America's top outsourcing customers aim to restore profits amid rising oil prices and weak consumer demand, they are asking Indian IT tech firms to do more with less -


Billing rates for back office, software development, Remote Infrastructure Managment  and maintenance projects are already down by up to 15%.


Over the past few months US retailers Walmart and Home Depot , apart from Cisco , Ericsson and insurance firm AIG , have cut rates that could see profit margins for top tier IT companies like TCS , Infosys & Wipro and others fall by 1-3 % this quarter.


Also see September blog - We saw this coming almost 9 monts back ....
http://itservice-aj.blogspot.com/2010/09/low-cost-it-price-hike.html


-Cheers

2010-2011 State of SMB Cloud Services Market

Cloud-based SMB solutions for Business Intelligence & Analytics and Mobile IT will become more available and such investments will become increasingly important –

AMI-Partners.

SaaS bundled options for BI and analytics will increase by 25% annually through 2015 to reach $500 million.

1.    SMBs are becoming more aware of the benefits of mining their data for insights that can result in savings and competitive advantage.

2.    The availability of BI/SaaS, as part of a larger bundle, makes it a very attractive and cost-effective proposition.

There is increased interest in BI/analytics solutions bundled with cloud infrastructure, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and unified communications (UC) offerings.

Interest in application access, collaboration and cloud computing among SMBs is also increasing because of the ubiquity of broadband, mobility and smart devices. Cloud will also spur rapid adoption of mobile solutions.

In its 2010-2011 State of SMB Cloud Services Market, AMI-Partners found nearly two thirds of SMBs equip their employees with smart phones for business purposes, and tablet computers are also experiencing very rapid uptake. Some 8% of SMBs plan to purchase over 1.5 million tablets for their businesses in the next 12 months, the study found. Collaborative working services such as hosted document sharing and UC (conferencing, messaging and presence) are provoking the highest level of future interest.

The phenomenal expansion of mobile devices in the consumer world is having its effect on the SMB workplace. Users now want to take the things they can do in their private lives into their professional working practices: for example, accessing email, simple internet apps and social networking sites, or checking availability of colleagues – and to do so wherever and whenever they need to.

The cloud model’s flexible payment model (pay per user per month) makes access to technology affordable for resource-constrained small and medium businesses. Cloud also makes it faster and easier for SMBs to implement new technologies, including mobile, which is important as 70% of SMBs have no dedicated IT staff resources.

-Cheers 

Storage Virtulization

Hitachi TrueNorth Specialization Program

Qualified participants in the Hitachi TrueNorth Partner Program can now leverage a combination of specializations to provide customized services and solutions to their customers in the areas of:

Virtualization Services Specialization – builds partners’ knowledge and capabilities in solving customers’ virtualization implementation challenges of any size. Enables partners to better utilize Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), the industry’s leading storage virtualization platform, to extend their customers’ existing storage assets and provide significant cost savings.

Migration Services Specialization – prepares partners to engage in migration planning and implementation by leveraging the virtualization and tiering capabilities of Hitachi VSP. Only HDS migration solutions allow for migration at the storage level between heterogeneous storage subsystems. With certification, partners can plan and design a solution that migrates their customers’ data quickly with minimal risk.

File and Content Services Specialization – enables partners to identify, design and implement storage solutions for their customers’ unstructured data. Certified partners can add services in Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) enablement, NAS enablement and data discovery with Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS).

Application Specialization and Vertical Solutions – leveraging the Services Specializations and HDS reference architectures that have been tested and proven in HDS labs, partners can add their own unique components to deliver differentiated, low risk and flexible application and vertical solutions to customers.

These solutions combine the company’s best practices with Hitachi Technology Alliance Program applications including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Symantec and VMware among others, to give partners in industries like health and life sciences, government, and communications, media and entertainment a wide range of potential solutions for diverse customer environments.

As IT environments continue to become increasingly more complex, customers are looking for their primary solution provider to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of services to help them better architect, implement and manage IT resources. Adding specific specializations and new vertical market solutions to the Hitachi TrueNorth Partner Program gives our partners greater levels of flexibility to offer custom and advanced services that will significantly expand their trusted advisor status with customers.

-Cheers

CIO: How to be a CSP - Cloud Service Provider

Looking at what the public cloud providers offer and how they operate is instructive and serves as a model for the CIO as CSP.

What are the core competencies that need to be in place to operate as a CSP?

Well, first there are the basics:

Consumer self-service Consumers of IT resources must be able to self-service with no need to interact with another human as part of the resource request. To achieve this usually  web interface with a service catalog of pre-packaged resources is used. This definitely does not mean sending an email off to a help desk requesting that a virtual machine be created on the requester's behalf.

Application abstraction from specific infrastructure. CSPs offer computing capability not specific hardware resources. To put it another way, the virtual machine provided via self-service may migrate around the cloud infrastructure, with no implied promise that it will reside on specific hardware.

Infrastructure funding separate from applications. Many CIOs "play the game" of getting funding for necessary infrastructure spending by tying it to specific application initiatives. Being a CSP means having a generalized pool of resources that applications use but are not tied to; Therefore funding for the infrastructure must be handled separately from application initiatives. Beyond this, one might observe that the overall level of infrastructure spend is likely to increase significantly.

Beyond the basics - The next set of implications are far more revolutionary and challenging for an IT organization, but getting them wrong will result in a failed initiative and a forced march to an external cloud provider.

More in Part II

-Cheers

Cloud Experience Center - EAST

EMC Corporation extended its collaboration with Cisco by jointly launching their Cloud Experience Centers in India today. This is a first-of-its-kind collaboration with EMC Center of Excellence and the Cisco Globalization Center East, creating a lab that provides Indian customers with an opportunity to experience the benefits and reliability of cloud-based IT infrastructure.

The Cloud Experience Centers aim to accelerate customers’ transition to an agile cloud-based infrastructure by enabling proof-of-concepts and helping them experience innovative solutions to some of their critical business challenges. The lab established is a live test bed for customers to come in and validate their business cases in a live environment.

The cloud experience centers in Bangalore will help customers address their concerns related to cloud deployment and evolve their business thereby helping drive greater business impact.

In addition, EMC and Cisco will work together to engineer solutions for the Indian market. These would include reference architectures which can be tested for reliability, security and scale, as well as cross training for engineers and partners on their respective technologies and solutions.

-Cheers