Cloud Computing :: Kenyan Perspective

Is The Cloud Finally Catching Up With Mighty Oracle?

2012-02-23T05:40:00.001-08:00

Oracle for years has seemed impervious to cloud computing. First Larry Ellison dismissed it. Then he sort of touted it, his version at least. But all along, Oracle was growing nicely. The industry chatter didn’t seem to matter. Big companies buy big software systems.
Something changed this winter.

Oracle’s software license sales limped up just 2% in December, and the company blamed customer budget cuts and fears over the European debt crisis. Sales to Europe, Africa and the Middle East make up a third of Oracle’s revenues. The stock took an instant 8% hit, but perhaps more tellingly is 22% off its May 2011 high. Investors appear to be signalling that Oracle‘s recent woes are due to more than just stingy customers. Could it be true that big, hulking IT organizations are changing buying patterns?

Patrick Walravens, a veteran software industry analyst at JMP Securities, believes so. He just lowered his ratings on Oracle to “market perform”. He blames the adoption of cloud computing by big accounts.

Walravens’s checks show a willingness of even the largest companies to buy cloud offerings from vendors such as Salesforce.com (this doesn’t surprise) and also privately-held, soon-to-go-public Workday. Walravens recently found one deal of 40,000 seats won by Salesforce from Oracle. He believes it isn’t the largest. Salesforce reports earnings this Thursday. Marc Benioff, no doubt, will mention these deals if he can. Workday, similarly, has won several large deals with 50,000 and above seats.

Both companies are much smaller than Oracle but pose a larger, longer-term threat. Salesforce is aiming to be a technology platform for selling all sorts of business software. Workday has grown sales impressively selling software to manage employees, but is aiming to extend into financials, too.
Meanwhile Walravens makes Oracle’s cloud effort sound like a tangled mess. The company did two large acquisitions of Web software firms: RightNow Technology and Taleo. These will take a while to make any difference. Then more immediately, Oracle has its own “public” clouds. There are nine of them straddling its universe of software offerings. And Oracle has several conferences launching in March to spread the message. But this technology is anything but live. Walravens tried to log in t one and got this message:

“When you submit this form, your information will be placed into a queue for access to controlled availability services. We will be provisioning Java and Database services in batches over the next several months. Our Fusion Application services will be made available shortly after that. You will be notified by email when your instance is ready.”

Ellison’s vision of success via industry consolidation may be at risk. His idea has long been to buy up most of the industry’s players, make them more efficient, upsell their customers on his other applications and the hardware to run it, and milk their maintenance revenues. Even though their technology may be dated, it is sticky. Customers can’t rip it out easily, so they’ll continue to pay the maintenance fees necessary to keep the stuff running. And they’ll buy Oracle’s underlying hardware stack to run it easily. This buys Oracle a brilliantly profitable cash flow to pour into its future.
But Walravens’s modeling suggests otherwise. He’s predicting that Oracle’s software maintenance revenue grows just 6% in the quarter ending this May. A year ago that same revenue line jumped 15% over the year prior. That’s a stunning difference.

Walravens also has Oracle barely growing its new software sales while its hardware business shrinks because it lacks that “pull through” of customers from the software side of the business. Overall he figures Oracle’s revenues grow 4.2% in fiscal year 2012.
Sure, it’s just a prediction, but if it is anywhere near true it is a severe challenge to the business model Oracle has been thriving on.

c/o Vicoria Barret | Forbes

The flip-side of the cloud

2012-02-08T01:33:00.000-08:00

From the onset, you need to have a clear picture of how the cloud will affect you in the long and short-term, that is where Intellisoftplus comes in providing you locally based analysis with global implications.

If your company is thinking of saving money by migrating to the cloud, don't forget to look to the long term return, a study suggests.
That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise.

Finance and IT professionals, facing the need for greater computing power for everything from operational management to hedge accountingare understandably tempted by SaaS, given the cloud's relatively low startup costs and the fact they may lack the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions.

And the corporate migration to the cloud is in fact proceeding apace, with nearly one-third of organizations polled in a Gartner research study responding that they either already use or plan to use cloud SaaS offerings to augment their core business intelligence functions.

'Frustrated by BI Demands'

But CFOs had better do their homework when determining how much it will cost them to use these offerings.

Software purchased as a service can usually be expensed, rather than capitalized, on the balance sheet. Buyers often think that SaaS is cheaper, but the reality is more complicated, with Gartner's cost models showing SaaS can be cheaper over the first five years, but not thereafter.

The long-term benefits lie elsewhere -- including in cash flow and reduced IT support costs, the report says.

"Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions," said James Richardson, research director at Gartner. "SaaS- and cloud-based BI is perceived as offering a quicker, potentially lower-cost and easier-to-deploy alternative, though this has yet to be proven."

SaaS and Faster Deployment

The use of SaaS may nevertheless lead to faster deployment, insight and value, particularly where IT is constrained by existing work and/or limited budget so that it cannot respond to demands for information and analysis as quickly as the business requires, says the report.

"It's evident that, despite growing interest, the market is confused about what cloud/SaaS BI and analytics are and what they can deliver," Richardson said.

Responding to the survey were 1,364 IT managers and business users of BI platforms in the fourth quarter of 2011. While only 17% of the organizations they work for said they have replaced or plan to replace parts of their core BI functions with cloud/SaaS offerings, 27% already use or plan to use cloud/SaaS options to augment their BI capabilities for specific lines of business or subject areas in the next 12 months.

AITEC Conference | Nairobi

2011-12-22T04:59:00.000-08:00

By next year 20 per cent of businesses will not own any IT hardware as they choose to shift their operations to the cloud, an ICT conference heard yesterday. Participants at the ongoing AITEC East Africa conference heard that many businesses are choosing to rent infrastructure as a service rather than buy expensive servers to run their businesses.

John Jenkins, chief executive officer of Business Connexion Services who spoke at the conference said a trend is emerging where firms will pay for services on demand much in the same way firms pay for utilities such as power and water. “The multi-sourcing trend is gaining momentum internationally. Cloud or online service providers operate on a bigger scale with a broader customer base. This means they are able to offer better price models and economies of scale,” Jenkins said.

Business Connexion is a South African firm that is angling to enter the cloud computing market in Kenya with an eye on outsourcing of IT functions. Safaricom has already launched its cloud computing services with what its calling the largest cloud in sub-Sahara Africa. Business Connexion however is taking a different approach seeking to take over the entire IT departments of companies to run them on their behalf. It is reportedly in talks with seven major local firms toward this end.

Currently, companies like Computech already second their staff to companies like Kenya Airways to run their IT functions, it emerged. Cloud computing was one of the main themes of the AITEC conference which also saw several innovations displayed in the areas of mobile technology and security.

However, several concerns have also arisen regarding cloud computing including sanctity of personal data held in the cloud. Recently, Google said it had been asked to provide several thousand According to Google's most recent transparency report, the first half of 2011 saw a 70% rise in requests from U.S. government and law enforcement to remove videos from YouTube, as well as a 29% rise in the number of U.S. government requests for private data about Google users.

At the UN Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi last month, when asked about the sanctity of private data, Google representatives said that they don't consider the data to belong to them. Asked if they would hand over such data to authorities, the company said that would depend on whether the court in a certain country has jurisdiction over the issue. No word on whether, a Kenyan court could order Google to provide private data belonging to Americans.

The second day was dominated by further talk of cloud computing as well as mobile applications developments with emphasis on user experience considerations.

One interesting feature was a mobile applications to help churches collect money instead of worshippers physically depositing money in collection bags. A church like ACK which was said to collect about Sh500million a week, could benefit from this, participants heard.

James Mbugua | The Star

Distributed Value | The cloud

2011-12-22T02:23:00.000-08:00

How realistic is it to have a budget of 15$ associated with computing and still deliver value over limited bandwidth areas, such as rural Africa; hence allowing for a deeper penetration of technology in Africa. Whereby 1 laptop can be utilized with cloud based tech, while multiple users just walk around with finger USB drives to enable logging of account details and specifications.

It has just been announced that in 2012 that the Cloud Computing World Series will be stopping in South Africa. The one day conference and exhibition will be taking place on 8 May at the Sandton Sun Hotel in Johannesburg.

According to the event organisers, Cloud Computing has become a truly mainstream form of IT delivery in the last few years, but with the evolution of the industry moving at lightning-fast pace, it’s important for businesses and organisations of all sizes to be given a clear picture of how this form of technology can improve and develop their use of IT – both in the workplace and on the move.

With South Africa’s recent boom in available bandwidth, cloud computing is expected to grow. Specifically in Africa, cloud computing gives organisations access to the latest technology and services not available locally and without the same overheads.

This will result in acceleration of businesses in locations that traditionally have not had the same technology infrastructure and services as the developed world.

The one-day event aims to give attendees the opportunity to discuss the latest topics in cloud, including security, mobile, applications, communications, virtualization, CRM and much, much more.

With over 400 people in attendance from across the region, and a number of top global exhibitors and expert speakers giving focused talks in the large keynote theatre, the 2012 Cloud Computing World Forum Africa is expected to be a one of the most anticipated events on the region's IT calendar.

What are the benefits of cloud computing | You ask

2011-12-22T01:42:00.000-08:00

Cloud Computing Harnesses the Power of Simplicity

The concept behind cloud computing is simple: it lets you run computer applications over the Internet, without having to buy, install or manage your own servers. You can run your company's IT operations with nothing more than a browser and an Internet connection. Applications, operating systems, servers and network switches all reside out of sight and within the metaphorical cloud, the Internet and are managed by your cloud computing vendor.

A New Way of Doing Business

Cloud computing turns conventional software delivery on its head in a number of ways:

Low overhead: Upgrades, maintenance and system administration take place in the cloud and are managed by the vendor, so you don't have to spend nights or weekends supervising a new version upgrade or a failed server. One industry analyst study found that cloud-based business software cost 50% less than on-premise software over a four-year period for a 100-employee company
Ease of access at anytime, and from anywhere: Cloud computing is "always on," making it easy to grow your business and support remote workers and locations, or support a highly mobile sales or service team, because people can access the cloud any time, day or night, from any browser, desktop ormobile device around the globe, 24x7
High availability: Cloud software architectures are designed from the ground up for maximum network performance, so they frequently deliver better application-level availability than conventional, on-premise solutions. For example, NetSuite commits to 99.5% availability for its customers, and provides data security such as PCI DSS compliance that would be cost prohibitive to achieve with on-premise software
Security: For many companies, the level of security and availability, disaster recovery and back-up provided by a software-as-a-service provider far exceeds that which they can provide themselves. NetSuite, for example, provides data security such as PCI DSS compliance that would be cost prohibitive to achieve with on-premise software
Fast deployment: You can be up and running with ERP, CRM or ecommerce applications, on a local or global scale, within a few months, rather than the six to 12 months it would take to install and troubleshoot conventional servers and software
Optimized performance: The cloud adjusts to your performance needs, dynamically assigning server cycles whenever and wherever you need them, and automatically adjusting to spikes in your business.
Subscription-based pricing: You pay as you go, often on an annual basis, unlike conventional systems where you have to make a major up-front investment in licenses, hardware and software. You benefit from better cash flow and far greater IT flexibility
Energy savings: By eliminating the need for on-premise hardware, cloud computing reduces overall server room electric consumption as well, which can save a mid-size businesses more $10,000 or more per year, according toa recent sustainability impact study.

You are in Control

Best of all, cloud computing lets you focus on your business rather than on your software. You don't have to use valuable IT resources to keep business systems on life support. Instead, you can re-deploy them to focus on more strategic business initiatives while leaving your cloud computing vendor to worry about scalability, security, uptime, application maintenance and system upgrades.

And you can be confident in taking your business public, or into new regions of the world, without outgrowing your cloud computing resources, thanks to the world-class datacenters typically provided by cloud computing vendors.

C/o our friends at Netsuite

Multi-Tenant Design | Google's Approach

2011-12-20T03:56:00.000-08:00

Google basically invented the cloud more than a decade ago. They were the first company who needed to deal with extremely large volume of data that no company has required to do before. I see that as a primary reason that they developed a complete set of technologies which are aimed to be a solid infrastructure for their business.

Within Google's datacenters it's all about Google's technologies. It's Google's servers (did you know that Google is 4th server manufacturer in the world after HP, IBM and Dell?), it's BigTable database, it's their own storage technology, security software and so on. Google has to develop those technologies because there was nothing available off-the-shelf at that time (even today there are very few companies who have built something similar, take Facebook as one of few examples) to support such a big volume of processing and data.

So how it really works? Each piece of data that you're storing on Google's infrastructure (it can be an email, file, calendar entry or whatever) is being split into small chunks of data and being distributed over large amount of servers spreading multiple datacenters. Why? Data security..

Let's take as a axiom that everything can be hacked (and there were many examples of that in the past like Pentagon, NASA and other highly secured premises). So, Google is also can be hacked (even if it's really hard to achieve given the scale of security operations in Google). In that case, Google need to prevent data leaking even in the case of server or complete datacenter is compromised.

By splitting your data into very small chunks and distributing it's over really large number of servers and datacenters, the potential hacker will only be available to get a small, obfuscated portion of your data. Basically, it's will give the hacker nothing..

In addition to splitting the data, Google replicates it across many additional datacenters to achieve high availability of your data. The data is being replicated across geographically dispersed locations to make it even more secure. After all, Google's effective SLA for 2011 is 99.998%.

So, what do I answer my customers when they ask me about where their's data is stored? My answer - It's storednowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Off course, storing the data in that much locations solves many other issues. Take for example the latency issue. Latency is cloud's primary counterargument. As a customers, we all want to access our services and data fast as it is when it's internal in our LAN.

By distributing the data, Google's customers are always working with their closest servers, thus minimizing the latency. Imagine a global company with multiple locations all over the world. They cannot "host" their data in some single location, doesn't matter what it will be. Someone will always suffer.

In Google's cloud, if you're American employee - you will work with Google's datacenter in US. If you're connecting from Europe, well again, - you will be working with European's datacenters. The same is also truth for other continents. So, everyone is getting his lowest possible latency.

c/o Vadim Solovey | Google Enterprise Expert

With several takes on the cloud architecture being debated, it would be unwise to take the Google format as the template to go by; but in terms of performance they do deliver.

10 Predictions About Cloud Computing

2011-12-20T00:13:00.000-08:00

Platform as a Service Rules :IaaS becomes niche. In the long-run, IaaS doesn't make sense, except for a limited set of scenarios. All IaaS providers want to be PaaS when they grow up.
Public Rules: Internal clouds will be niche. In the long-run, Internal Clouds (clouds operated in a company's own data centers, aka "private clouds") don't make sense. The economies of scale, specialization (an aspect of economies of scale, really) and outsourcing benefits of public clouds are so overwhelming that it will not make sense for any one company to operate its own data centers. Sure, there need to be in place many security and isolation measures, and feel free to call them "private clouds" -- but they will be owned and operated by a few major public providers.
Specialized Clouds: There are many dimensions to an application: the pattern of its workload; the government regulations it must adhere to; the geographic access to it; the programmig language and framework it supports; the levels of security, performance and reliability it requires; and other more specialized requirements. It's not a one-size-fits-all world. At least, not always. There will be big generic clouds, and then, many specialized clouds.
Government Regulation: The largest cloud providers will become nationally strategic infrastructure (like utilities, financials, telcos, airlines and shipping companies in the past). Given my "public rules" prediction above, cloud providers will become crucial infrastructure to the economy and the interests of their respective nations. They will become "too big to fail". Any change in their pricing will have a profound effect on the economy. And they will also hold the risk of a "cloud run" (similar to a "bank run", a sudden surge of demand they haven't anticipated. Not to mention the fact that they will maintain the sensitive data of consumers, corporations and government agencies. Any way you slice it, it spells regulation. But if history teaches us anything, this regulation will only come after "The Great Cloud Catastrophe" (use your imagination to figure out what that will look like).
The Control vs. Freedom Debate: This sums up the story of cloud computing so far. Freedom is the catch-all phrase for drivers of cloud adoption (no upfront costs, on-demand, self-service, empowerment of the rank & file - e.g., developers), but control (or lack thereof) is the catch-all phrase of barriers to adoption by large enterprises. Every democratic country experiences this: there is sometimes a contradiction between the so-called sacred principles of rule-of-law and personal freedom. It's a matter of drawing the line -- and we're just in the beginning stages of understanding this issue when it comes to cloud computing. This debate will be with us for years to come and will shape the variety of enterprise cloud computing offerings.
Cloud Federations - While AWS has enjoyed tremendous international success, in any business that relies heavily on trust, such as IT, nothing beats a local brand. So people will flock to the cloud of their trusted national telco or big IT provider. But on the flip side, they will need to reach a global audience and will want servers around the world. As a result, we will see the formation of cloud federations, similar to what we see in airline alliances, such as Star, SkyTeam and Oneworld.
Financial Efficiency and Sophistication: Computing is a commodity, and every commodity ends up being traded, future-traded, brokered, arbitraged, speculated and manipulated with derivative instruments. The good: the market becomes very efficient. The bad: the market becomes complex and opaque. We are already seeing spot markets
Cloud Standards: About two years ago there was a strong wave of interest and discussion about the need for cloud standards.. But it is also inevitable. We will, however, see multiple competing standards. At least one formal stanard specification from a standards body and several de facto standards from large commercial players such as Amazon and VMWare.
The Ecosystem Wars: Success in building an ecosystem will be a determining factor in who wins and loses in the cloud. It is not just about the size and breadth of the ecosystem, but how well it all works together. In many ways, Amazon has done a poor job of this so far, but it has the one big compelling factor for an ecosystem: a very large install base.
Horizontal and Vertical Consolidation: As with any industry, as cloud computing matures, it will consolidate. This will happen both horizontally, for example large IaaS players will roll-up regional and smaller IaaS and hosting providers, as well as vertically, for example IaaS providers will acquire cloud management system providers such as RightScale and en-stratus.

Geva Perry at Cloud economics provides a thought provoking long term prediction that seems to coincide with the lunge of big hitting corporate investing in departments that focus majorly on cloud advancement; locally Safaricom, seven Seas and Bandwidth and Cloud Services Group provide a context for this very view.

Whats your take on this progression.

The blind & The cloud

2011-12-19T23:43:00.000-08:00

It was six men of Info Tech
        To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Cloud
        (Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
        Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Cloud,
        So sure that he was boasting
“I know exactly what this is…
       This Cloud is simply Hosting.”

The Second grasped within the Cloud,
        Saying, “No it’s obvious to me,
This Cloud is grid computing…
        Servers working together in harmony!”

The Third, in need of an answer,
        Cried, "Ho! I know its source of power
It’s a utility computing solution
       Which charges by the hour.”

The Fourth reached out to touch it,
        It was there, but it was not
“Virtualization,” said he.
        “That’s precisely what we’ve got!”

The Fifth, so sure the rest were wrong
        Declared “It’s sass you fools,
Applications with no installation
        It’s breaking all the rules!"

The Sixth (whose name was Benioff),
        Felt the future he did know,
He made haste in boldly stating,
        “This *IS* Web 3.0.”

And so these men of Info Tech
        Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
        Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
        And all were partly wrong!

So, what perspectives are you seeing out there? Does keeping the different perspectives in mind help make sense of the different definitions being proposed of the ever evolving cloud?

Cloud Computing :: Kenyan Perspective

Is The Cloud Finally Catching Up With Mighty Oracle?

The flip-side of the cloud

AITEC Conference | Nairobi

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Distributed Value | The cloud

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What are the benefits of cloud computing | You ask

Cloud Computing Harnesses the Power of Simplicity

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