Ossama Eldeeb, Director, Partner Organization, VMware Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, explains how cloud providers of different sizes can help companies embrace the cloud.
Organisations have an insatiable need to modernise their application portfolios. They know it is the only way they can deliver the experiences both employees and customers expect and reap the productivity and financial rewards on offer.
But, while cloud has become the de facto way to modernise applications, there isn’t just one, monolithic cloud out there. With differing regulatory and data requirements across the many market sectors and regions, managing the route to the cloud gets trickier. Then, throw in the very real fact that not all public clouds play nicely together.
So how do businesses attain this multi-cloud existence and manage that cloud complexity when all they really care about is how they achieve a critical business goal through the speedy development and access to the app itself.
The answer to that largely comes down to the partnership organisations have with a third-party enabling partner. Some large businesses do go it alone and run in-house teams responsible for running their clouds. But many others, without specialist cloud, and/or international nation data sovereignty or regulatory knowledge, rely on partners to be imbedded in the ultimate success of an organisation’s cloud consumption and use.
Partners can help customers by taking on workloads that typically slow customers down. They can become ‘the virtual CIO’, if you like, helping with decisions, planning and resourcing enterprise cloud strategy.
But in an increasingly global cloud market, dominated by public cloud hyperscalers, can all cloud partners play in the same cloud sandpit?
Solving complexity
Over the next three years, IT leaders expect the number of different cloud environments, private, public and edge, they use to manage, build, and run applications to increase by 55% (rising from 5.6 today to 8.3 in 2023). More clouds. More complexity.
With technology at all levels becoming more important, customers are faced with a lot of choices, and many are looking for assistance in making the right ones. This is an area where partners are well-positioned to assist.
When most organisations look at their IT estates, that complexity is born out of years of IT service management supporting a business in constant transition. Therefore, customised IT approach versus out of the box offerings are largely not suitable. The same with cloud. Over time we have evolved from non-IT managed, stealth funded BU investments in cloud to centralised cloud management functions including cloud security, economics and management.
These functions and the people and skillsets within are hard to find, hard to train and particularly scarce. With multiple, hyperscale clouds all doing things differently they have been complemented with a growing area of solutions for cloud management. However, even these have their limits.
Most organisations have now gained some control on cloud by providing a catalogue of ‘approved cloud services’ to their business. But they have, in-effect, inadvertently put the brakes on the potential for what cloud can truly offer. As a user, how frustrating it must be to know what you need, but you are not permitted because IT doesn’t support it.
Partners and specialists in cloud solutions and services are the experts in their areas and have become the backbone to deliver the services customers want and need, helping them manage the complexity and value cloud can bring.
They are also best placed to help them navigate the differing geopolitical, data sovereignty laws, manage the business cost, and help select the clouds and cloud mix required for app modernisation.
The evolution of the partner
Partners who can help deliver cloud most effectively are continuing to evolve, and, in the last few years, have developed strategies to engage with other partners to complement their portfolios for the benefit of their customers. This has been an evolution in response to a market need, with partners seeking new revenue channels in providing those essential managed services and professional and value-added services, all while supporting their customers’ cloud needs.
These partnered solution specialists deliver huge benefits, offering customers choice where they had none; the ability to run their clouds on one, unified cloud platform with consistency of management; provide advice on the optimal clouds to run and move workloads; and provide the right path to migrate datasets to SaaS or PaaS solutions, and so on.
Many cloud partners have also formed areas of excellence in, for example, data management, big data, AI or vertical industry specialists. These partners, irrespective of size and scale, are able to provide organisations with a single operational and support cloud environment that they would not get from hyperscalers, such as expert consultancy through to supporting the organisation’s service on-premises, and to a public cloud, as well as the solutions and services running on-top. A huge plus in most businesses’ eyes.
But this is also where the worlds of the hyperscalers and partners collide in the eyes of the customer. Hyperscale clouds, from AWS to Azure, are a significant resource for a partner to add to their cloud mix, and for customers to consume due to their sheer scale of offerings and automation. It is this ‘choice’ that has become critical in the cloud mix. Having the freedom to select a cloud, for example, that has data legislative controls in place, has compliance and can tell you where your workload is running, which may or may not be a hyperscale endpoint.
But this is also where clouds don’t always play nicely, with challenges in migrating workloads or the reversibility of workloads, without refactoring or re-platforming, for example.
The emergence of the universal ‘cloud sandpit’ everyone can play in
That is why we vehemently believe that having one cloud platform, able to run workloads in and out of any public cloud running the same platform, without requiring any refactoring, and all with the same consistency – of operations, security and management – are at the heart of an ideal multi-cloud infrastructure – and a partner’s toolkit.
Simply put, it provides choice. Choice for partners to select all the right clouds to run an organisation’s workloads, and choice for the customer. The best cloud for the job, with no lock-in. A perfect runway to build out all the valuable solutions and services, on-top.
One truly universal ‘cloud sandpit’ where all partners can play and help realise its full potential for customers. As Julie Sweet, chief executive officer, Accenture, puts: “Cloud is the single most powerful tool for mastering change.”
It is this coming together of the right expertise, at the right time, with the right technology, underpinned by that cloud platform where true partnerships offer customers the most rewards.
A partner for life, not just for cloud
As organsiations seek faster time to market for new products, improve employee productivity, and free up resources to deliver new products, they cannot do it alone. They need a partner that can deliver the applications, over any cloud, combined with the great services and consultancy organisations need.
Dilip Kalliyat, President of Huco, a Dubai-based technology solutions provider and VMware MSC partner, answers this by saying: “Partners understand the nuances of the local market and can help businesses bring new initiatives to market faster, often being the first in their industries to offer the services customers need.”
Partners who invest in and understand how to leverage a ubiquitous cloud platform to drive apps and services are in pole position. They can provide enterprises with everything they need, freeing customers to focus on their own business goals.
While at first glance, some organisations will see their route to application modernisation via cloud(s), as a minefield. Partners are there to ensure it’s not. Irrespective of country or size, partners can compete in the same cloud service sandpit – but only if they share one common cloud platform.
