Cloud computing Restructuring enterprise Application Delivery

Companies have been given a memo about cloud computing, and surveys show that more than one-third of companies plan or have implemented a certain level of cloud technology or services. What surprises IT experts is the scope of application delivery that cloud computing affects.

The analysis company IDC reports that public cloud services are growing at a rate of 30% a year, of which 75% of the growth comes from software and services (SaaS). SaaS products like Salesforce.com, Gmail, and Microsoft Office 365 are very attractive to businesses. The PSA insurance and financial services company, located in Maryland Baltimore, is an insurance brokerage company with 150 employees. CTO Take Andrew Bartels, although he chose Salesforce.com a few years ago, the company's sales team is accustomed to using the original application (mainly AMS360) for calling and extending personalization, and explicitly refusing to use Salesforce.com. They had to refactor all the existing data (services, their suppliers, sales teams, customers, pipelines, etc.) to Salesforce.com, and doubled the effort without a special return. "To be tactful, it's not very popular," Bartels said.

SaaS was chosen because it might be a good thing for Bartels IT organizations, saving them the cost of investing in new business intelligence/customer Relationship Management (BI/CRM) applications and simplifying support and management--which is the basic advantage of cloud computing. But it makes the user's situation worse.

Fast forward to a few years, cloud services burst, Bartels said, can fundamentally for his users to sell cloud computing to provide an effective way.

Bartels builds existing services for its data-hosted locally-from other services, such as gooddata.com, bi tools running online, Informatica Cloud, online data Integration services, and e-mail indexing services running as a service; But also through active endpoints company customized its own salesforce.com panel.

Feeling a little dizzy about the prospect? Bartels says it is only possible and feasible because all of these services, standardized by APIs, are highly available, and most of them, once combined, will allow him to provide users with what is actually useful- Salesforce.com experience that cannot be replicated has all the needs of the user, and more importantly, it brings unprecedented performance to the user.

"You've got valuable support for pushing acceptance rates," he said. Acceptance rates will rise rapidly, and once salespeople see their peers close the pipes and do whatever they like (within the terms of the sale), in Bartels's view, the application delivery has changed forever. Combined with the ease of use of Web 2.0, several supercomputers based on the subscription model process his data, and the need for traditional BI has ended.

Bartels says that through the right product and enough ability he can replicate any service internally, but the analysis of spending will definitely support cloud computing. His bandwidth is now robust, he can continue to have his own data, investment is meaningless. "If you want a traditional BI solution, you can't cross the threshold of less than 50,000 dollars," he said.

What about private and mixed clouds?

On the other side of the IT company that focuses on infrastructure, private and mixed cloud products are also improving it delivery for end users. Altaf Rupani, vice president of global strategy and IT architecture at Dow Jones, said in an interview recently that the private cloud he built up was initially a small exploration project, as Bartels said, and needed to be gradually marketed to end users rather than forced to accept them.

"We let technology lead the world," he said. Rupani built its own cloud computing with commercial hardware, VMware and Dynamicops software, and built a Web portal that allows users to access and get self-service supplies, following manageable licenses. He has started distributing cloud instances in testing and development, which is certainly the initial starting point for cloud computing; Rupani said Dow Jones did not accept public cloud computing for security and compliance considerations.

Today, thanks to soft marketing and the ability to access existing resources without it (the main), any new server available at Dow Jones is a cloud server. These costs only half of the cost of a physical instance, Rupani says, including artificial and up to 350 instances anywhere. He wants all the new infrastructure to be available in this way, and says the scope of the business (Dow Jones, the first media company, is gradually beginning to deliver High-tech services such as real-time data analysis) and is moving to its own cloud computing in an orderly fashion.

In the same way as Bartels, the online applications that deliver consumer offline data (which the user actually wants), and Rupani, such as Amazon or Rackspace do, deliver the infrastructure to developers, there is clearly a fundamental shift. When cloud computing was a new concept a few years ago, companies like Salesforce.com began to step in and lead, even as they knew that real change had begun quietly. Now it looks like the spring of corporate cloud computing has come.