Nikhil Batra, Research Manager – Telecom, IDC talked about cloud adoption in APAC – emerging market spending on cloud is 25% of those of mature markets, growth prospects much higher for emerging. Using cloud for digital transformation.
Maturity by country – Oz NZ Singapore most mature, Thai Phil, HK Malaysia Indonesia least mature. Most benefits to come to IT operations.
Q: starting point to cloud journey?
Matt Allcoat, Chief Architect, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa & Turkey, BT Global Services, said there’s lots of organisations – about 26% – at the startup, immature point. Everyone wants to unify cloud and bring it together. LOB managers go out and buy unconnected cloud services. People use ID management and cryptography to unify cloud services.
Chris Rezentes, Regional Manager, Partner & Product Strategy – Asia Pacific, Verizon, said you need to understand what the customer wants, and what cloud services deliver to the customer. People are still concerned about security.
Hisham Muhammad, Director, Global Solutions Architect, AP, Equinix, said as a cloud exchange, we realised that we’re at the forefront of where cloud providers congregate – they put nodes in our facility. The challenges for cloud exchanges is the advice that we give and the advice given by software vendors. Early adopters already consume multiple cloud services. This adds complexity. So it’s sometimes best for cloud providers to collaborate.
Allcoat talked about shadow IT: some company CEOs goes to their C-level execs and tells them to go out there and make it work – don’t worry too much abut rules. The CIO can’t just say no, it’s insecure, so we have to enable that and make it work.
Rezentes said that customers want end2end SLAs. We find we have to understand how they use the cloud, the customer is expecting network providers to know it all because we deliver the network, not a cloud service but if there’s a problem, customer asks us even if we don’t provide that service. We do have SLAs for our own services of course.
Allcoat said customers are asking for more, eg we can provide contact centre in the cloud, newsfeeds, Salesforce etc. They want to combine those services that work for their business. Not off the shelf items, but bespoke services – not infrastructure.
Muhammed said that there’s a need for a combined service delivery.
Q: Cloud service delivery challenges via SDN?
Allcoat said SDN is easy in a walled garden, the challenge is to do it in a carrier-to-carrier environment – need to develop new standards and agree who to cross charge which gets complex.
Rezentes agreed, saying that that level of network provider orchestration starts with vendors. Our strategy would be to include NFV and SDN services, and we need vendors who can use that same software for SDN to communicate between SPs.
Q: SPs have been investing to develop new services?
Muhammed said that we need to understand that the late-to-game SP faces a pricing challenge. It means you need get in at the strategic level. So whatever state you’re in, the perceptions of stakeholders is to understand what the expectations are across the organisation.
Rezentes said people will be using multiple clouds and this needs to be incorporated with the network. It will save a lot of headaches if you use a network provider to make it work.
Allcoat said it’s easy to take the professional services hit as part of the deal. People often focus on the dealmaker and ignore the rest of the company. Instead, you need to meet the right stakeholders and understand who in the company is right to talk to.
Courtesy: NetEvents
