Cloud Computing

In my earlier blog Google App Engine – Where to start? I wrote on one of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider on how enterprises can use?

For the Cloud to be embraced by enterprises there should be less fear on vendor lock-in by using proprietary platforms.

The primary need to over come that fear is aligning to industry wide standards.  Cloud Standards which are important and relevant from a Cloud platform adoption perspective are Portability, Integration and Interoperability.

Let us look what are the industry initiatives happening on these cloud standards.

There are number of working groups, standard bodies are trying to address this. However, the most prominent one are:

• Unified Cloud Interface
• Open Cloud Manifesto
• Cloud Security Alliance

Unified Cloud Interface uses semantic web concepts and acts like a cloud broker (using Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol -XMPP) and addresses both Platform as a Service (PaaS) interface and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) interface.

Open Cloud Manifesto tries to address standards around security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance etc.

Integration (Cloud and the enterprise), Interoperability (between clouds) can mature faster and However, portability can remain as a wish for longer time. For e.g. today’s major PaaS platforms Google App Engine, MS Azure, Salesforce force.com all will need a complete rewrite to move from one Cloud service provider to another.

Overall Cloud standards are an effort in the positive direction for the enterprises to adopt the cloud.

Posted by Lakshmanan G at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I had an opportunity to discuss the cloud computing ROI model with a large banking major.  We did some illustration using the simplistic ROI framework and figured-out the savings to the scale of 90% on CAPEX and 50% OPEX cost Y-o-Y.

The numbers were attractive enough to get attention of “C” profiles, he was bit positively surprised. The first question he asked was: what’s the trap here? He understands the concerns of security and outsourcing in banking business better than me, so I need not attempt raising technical obstacles. I simplified the answer: It is paradigm-shift; IT needs to manage this change! To my surprise, the wave-length matched just here, and we had constructive meeting.

We discussed the future of IT is in cloud, it is a big wave like moving from DOS to Windows; Desktops to Internet and On-premise IT to Cloud; through iterative lean IT transformation. We were on the same-page throughout, we concluded meeting with a note saying that – enterprises will adopt cloud tomorrow if not today; but if they fail to do it, they will be forced to adopt.

The Cloud ROI Framework

I will present an illustration of cloud based ROI model, I am not MBA, I used a very simple framework, maybe it is over simplistic, please bare-with my expertise on this. You can help me with the flaws in the model including depreciation, tax benefits, Y-o-Y savings and NPV – I don’t understand this well enough.

Excluding migration cost, it releases the 90% of the CAPEX investments and reduces OPEX cost by 50% every year. I know, there are multiple assumptions in this model, also not every piece of data might be accurate, however the range of benefit is still attractive, we can make refinement & correction in given customer context.

The Financial Model

I also tried to work-out some sort of financial model for Y-o-Y savings and what-if analysis around cost of migration.

You may want to read my previous blog entry on The Economics of Cloud Computing for some more horizontal business cases. You may also want to know How enterprises have benefited from cloud in my earlier blog entry.
 

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I have summarized some of the horizontal business cases for cloud computing & on-demand services in general in this post.

• 100TB of storage space on cloud  can save $1M per year by leveraging Storage as a Service
• 100 server provisioning can save >1MN per year, reduces time-to-market from 6-8 weeks to few min by leveraging Infrastructure as a Service
• Reduce TCO of Software by 50% by leveraging Software as a Service & Platform as a Service

Summary

I have consolidated, analyzed, summerized and unified the information from various internet resources. The business cases are somewhat simplistic & academic in nature; take it with a pinch of salt. It also needs to be contextualized to the customer scenario to be more meaningful:

• Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network
• Microsoft Online Services Business Value
• Google Online Calculator
• FPWeb.Net Managed MOSS 2007 Hosting
• Inetium Competitive Analysis
• SalesForce CRM Editions Price Comparison

Your feedback, thoughts are welcome.

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"Enterprises can save at least 10$ per GB per Year AND shrink 90% of their IT CAPEX by moving the storage infrastructure on cloud" 

Does it sound like a science fiction movie? It’s not - read on.

Background

In my previous blog – How enterprises have benefited from the cloud? – I mentioned NASDAQ case-study that mentions the initial monthly bills received from Amazon were as low as $5. I was wondering how much cost-benefit NASDAQ would have gained by storing trading data on the Amazon S3? Also, I wanted create a re-usable ROI model to convert this research into a sophisticated solution offering OR SaaS service offering for system integrators.

I studied various infrastructure offerings and custom storage solution providers such as Amazon S3, ParaScale, Vembu StoreGrid, and Nivarnix. I also studied recent trends around social collaboration applications with offline document synchronization capabilities for e.g. Box, Google Gears and Microsoft Live Mesh and I am sure there are many more *drive.com offerings.

What is the outcome?

I got interesting data-points from Nivarnix competitive analysis. I summarized the case for storage-as- a-service as below – there are multiple enterprise scenarios that can leverage storage-as-as-service offering to avail the cost-benefits: for e.g. document management system, back-up & archival system, data warehouse or data-marts storage etc.

However, there are challenges in terms of security and data ownership where enterprise need further convincing.

What is in-the-store for each stakeholder?

I understand that there are primarily 4 key stakeholders: Customer, Plain Storage Infrastructure Provider, Storage Solution Provider and System Integrator. The customer saves large CAPEX and also optimizes service cost by leveraging pay-per-use pricing model from the service providers. It also helps customers to reduce time-to-market through on-demand storage provisioning.

The System Integrators can create new create a new revenue channel through ADM service offerings or solution (package) customization for storage-on-cloud. The System Integrators can also create a Solution or SaaS offering specific to domains and enable non-linear revenue growth. The Storage Solution Provider can partner with Systems Integrators for join go-to-market strategy and revenue sharing models to increase the adoption-rate and broaden market reach.

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)