Capgemini Public and Hybrid Cloud - Service Brokering

Subtitle:  "Turning Days Into Hours"

 

Results of survey of 460 Execs:

- 45% of decisions to buy cloud services are in the business not in IT

- most claim to have a cloud strategy, most are being cautious adopters

- claiming 78% of new deployments are to cloud (CG did not clarify if this included internal cloud)

- want to move from CapEx to OpEx

- would like to move faster to cloud but secuirty, data sovereignty are main concerns

 

Service provision evolution:

- All internal IT services

- All IT services delivered by one external supplier outsourcing

- IT services delivered by multiple outsourcing

- Future will be micro sourcing of cloud services (according to CG)

Managing so many suppliers will be complex and not easy to control

 

 

Using a platform based on VMware vCD, vCAC, IT Business Manager (ITBM) and BMC software, CG are building what is essentially a brokerage service, or will be when they have completed their current work.  They are not building their own data centres, but partnering across mutiple service provider clouds.  GC are a member of the Open DC Alliance.  It will be pre-packaged "business solutions" catalogue across multiple application providers.  These will include intergration services across multiple IaaS and SaaS providers were necessary (and will, of course, mean lock-in to CG if no-one else is offering just the pre-packaged business service you need).

 

Customer will have choice of commercials and service levels driven by policy based provisioning.  Consolidated billing (with GC fees added of course) will be available across all the elements making up a business service.

 

It won't be quite brokerage yet, but CG see it moving that way, with trading of services like commodities.  At the moment there is no standard way of describing services and service level which makes commodity trading difficult until standards are reached. CG are using an "API factory" in India to build the interfaces to and from different service offerings.

The software in use will provide users with a dashboard of their services and costs and an administration view.  Also provides CG with their view of consumption, costs, margins, SLA performance etc.

 

 



Thoughts: Looks like a great idea to offer pre-packaged services.  From what we saw today it looks like there's still a little way to go in completing the development and getting a real service offering to market.  It has real potential, CG will need to focus on the largest market first to prove the model works, then they will have an extremely complex job building and maintaining all those interfaces and changes to those interfaces over time.  I hope they can make it work as this has potential to be game changing in the market.

VCloud Hybrid Service

Claiming this is a big a change as esx was. Essentially VMware is now a cloud service provider. Using co-lo facilities.
Deploying a VM is now straightforward, but adding the network, storage, firewall etc creates delay.
Extract, pool, automate is the mantra of the week
VMware services in 3 US data centres
UK available in Q1 2014
Focussing on virtual private cloud
5GHz CPU
20GB RAM
$2 per hour
10Mbps standard connection over secure tunnel or 1Gbps for virtual private cloud 10Gbps for dedicated cloud are available as dedicated lines
Data protection is an add-on service
DR as a service is available
Portal to make services available to business, including dynamic, status reports.
Shopping cart approach to purchase- multiple different pricing models
Data migration at start up is normally via physical NAS transfer.
For the hosting only you can manage using a browser. If you have existing comprehensive internal VMware environment then it is claimed to be easy to migrate vms to VMware vCloud Hybrid Services.
Thoughts: I remember asking VMware folks if they would be providing their own cloud services when they announced vCD - they said no as all the service providers would be buying vCD - this could be VMware's recognition that the service providers have largely chosen other routes?

Making the Most of Hybrid Cloud

Will be interesting to see how much of this content admits to the existence of non-VMware clouds...
Starting with a level setting.

Making analogies with how containerisation of the shipping industry.
vApp is the standardized container.
These vApps run on vmware based clouds: Att, blue lock, colt, csc, loch, singhtel, t-systems are available providers with services across 24 countries

Application choice when moving to the cloude is important- data security and location to meet compliance, service levels required - crucial to provide right sizing for security and service level requirements as over specifying is an expensive mistake
the closer to commodity the application stack is, the easier it will be to move to the cloud, eg email, sharepoint, web, ecomm
Ensure splitting of components can still perform over a link to other components in the cloud
Costs to migrate
- understanding internal tco is complex
- need to add bandwidth costs
- migration effort
- easiest if you have vApps of course
- use feasibility analysis (vmware consultancy service) including internal costs for comparison

Business value?
- give devs quick access and less time building environments
- agility ( particularly in agile dev env or peaky workloads)
- potentially lower cost of ownership
- avoid the grey economy of cloud outside IT control (survey says somewhere between 37 and 58%, depending on who you ask suspect or know this happens in their business.

Thoughts - the need to work out what is right to provision via a cloud seems to be the obvious analysis to do before making a decision. I think what is lacking is a clear methodology for making these decisions. Need cloud centre of excellence to manage this, design solution, deliver solution and manage contracts.

Of course Dell Multi-Cloud Manager will help once you have decided what steps to take into the cloud.
And to answer my earlier question, apart from recognising that out of control cloud services exist, the solution is very VMware focussed. The principles of making decisions applies generically.