October 13th, 2009

Cloud computing belongs on your three-year roadmap

Posted by James Staten @ 9:18 am

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Investment, Hardware, Finance, Phil LeClare

Welcome to the fourth quarter of 2009; what we at Forrester call planning season for most IT departments. In a typical year, this is the time that infrastructure and operations professionals spend lots of cycles burning through what remains of the 2009 budget and building plans for investment in 2010 with the hope of gathering a bit more budget than last year. Of course this is no ordinary year. Economists and financial prognosticators, like our own Andrew Bartels are predicting a long recovery from the recession and further delays in IT spending. That means another year of your infrastructure getting older. There’s two ways of looking at this problem and thus your budget proposals for 2010:

• You can either predict when you will get the rights to refresh the systems and return to the infrastructure spending patterns of old, or

• You can realize that a long recovery means a new normal for IT spend is in order.

We think the latter is far more fruitful even if it isn’t entirely accurate. It’s both prudent and different because your go-forward infrastructure strategy likely isn’t the same anymore either. If you are like the respondents to our Q3 2009 Enterprise and SMB Hardware Survey, North America and Europe, you:

• Continue to consolidate infrastructure like a mad clear-cutting logging company.

• Are repackaging workloads into VMs faster than an Amazon.com shipping manager.

• Are standardizing like McDonalds – everything from hardware, golden master server images to change management processes as consistent and repeatable as possible.

• Are racing like Usain Bolt to shorten deployment times from weeks or months, to new world records.

• Are learning to love automation – if only in a small way.

In other words, you aren’t buying, running or managing infrastructure the way you used to. So why plan your budget the old way. And further, why budget for the new now, when you can budget for what’s next in your journey. As we noted in our report, Assessing Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity, there is a clear path of improvement for infrastructure architecture and that’s toward customer empowerment, deployment standardization, provisioning and capacity management automation and further consolidation – even across business units. Yes, I said it.

In other words you’re evolving into an Infrastructure as a Service cloud. But despite vendor claims for products such as the VMware vCloud, Eucalyptus and Elastra offerings, most enterprises can’t just drop in an IaaS platform and they have a cloud. You have to prepare your organization and your operations staff for this. But that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve this aim in a short time horizon or that you can’t embrace public or hosted cloud infrastructures in the near term.

Forrester feels that cloud computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so you can gain the experience necessary to take advantage of it in its many forms to transform your organization into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business. Find small non-critical projects to start with so you can learn how best to apply these services to your business and combine this learning with the advice in our Tech Radar to help plot the timing for these investments. Also read through the many cloud computing case studies like those on USA.gov and CryoPort to see how others are doing this. By investigating these top 15 technology trends and shifting to a strategic rightsourcing approach to IT portfolio investment you can hollow out the MOOSE and become more strategic (and viewed more as a change agent) to the business.

October 2nd, 2009

Assessing the maturity of cloud computing services

Posted by James Staten @ 8:55 am

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Middleware, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Phil LeClare

The number one challenge in cloud computing today is determining what it really is, what categories of services exist within the definition and business model and how ready these options are for enterprise consumption. Forrester defines cloud computing as a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

While definition is crucial to having a fruitful discussion of cloud, the proper taxonomy and maturity of these options is more important when planning your investment strategy. To this aim, Forrester has just published our latest Tech Radar that maps the existing cloud service categories (not the individual vendors within each category) along maturity and value impact lines to help you build your strategic roadmap.

The report identified 11 service categories that fall into three classes of cloud services – software you rent (Software-as-a-service, or SaaS), middleware services and platforms that help developers build cloud-based applications, and infrastructure services and platforms that are places to deploy cloud applications. Note that we did not restrict the second and third categories to Platforms-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms – because there is value in discrete middleware and infrastructure services in the cloud just as there is in your data center. While Amazon Web Services is clearly an IaaS leader providing a robust set of compute, storage and middleware services, there are also discrete offerings, like Boomi’s cloud integration service that does no more than integration and does not need to be a full platform player to be valuable. In fact there can be significant advantage that comes from this type of focus on just one thing.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison continues to grab headlines for his assertion that the cloud isn’t anything new and to his credit he’s at least half right. Just because applications are delivered from a cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean any of the aspects of application design or components of a service-oriented architecture don’t apply – in fact they have just as much relevance as they did on-premise. But how these services are delivered is what is different. There is a clear difference between an on-premise, single instance deployment of TIBCO and the highly scalable, multi-tenant integration service from Boomi. Tenancy, shared economics, virtualized deployment, and cloud service-to-service integration are game changers for those who are using these services. Not only do they bring potential cost advantage to applications that might otherwise have been deployed on-premise but they create opportunities for new business applications that simply wouldn’t be feasible any other way.

That’s clearly the case for Cryoport, a maker of cryogenic containers for live medical tissue. Delivering these materials safely was very hands-on and expensive until cloud computing came along. Same with genome research; medical research universities and pharmaceutical companies had to make large investments in HPC labs to crunch the massive volumes of DNA data, until cloud computing economics came along.

But cloud computing isn’t the be-all, end-all that many portray and they can’t suit all uses today and may not in the future either. Thus it behooves you to build your roadmap using guideposts to the maturity and applicability of these emerging options. We hope this report helps you bound and plan your cloud investments and look forward to your feedback on how we can assist further.

September 2nd, 2009

When is a VMware cloud a vCloud? Let the API wars begin

Posted by James Staten @ 7:05 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: API, Amazon.com Inc., VMware Inc., Virtualization, Hardware, Phil LeClare

Attention enterprises —Pop Quiz: If your favorite hosting provider launches a cloud service that supports VMware vSphere and is part of the VMware vCloud initative, are they providing you with the rich vCloud functionality VMware is touting at VMworld this week?

The answer is no, because vCloud hasn’t been delivered yet and probably won’t be until the first half of 2010. If you answered yes, don’t feel too bad because VMware, in its efforts to prepare the market for vCloud, has made the current state very confusing. First off, the company grandfathered all the members of its VMware Service Provider Partner (VSPP) program into being vCloud partners. This has led many a traditional hoster – who doesn’t even have an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud platform to say they are now a cloud. Sorry, but if you can’t automatically provision VMs upon request from a self-service portal, don’t have pay per use billing and require a 12-month commitment, you’re not a cloud platform. Second, a hosting provider can support the vSphere VM format without letting you manage your VMs in a standard way (they don’t even have to give you access via vCenter). And third, if you want to integrate with their platform programmatically, their APIs are likely their own.

Why does this matter? You use VMware in-house, you just want a cloud that does too. The VM format supported isn’t really the issue (heck converting your VMs from VMDK to, OVF, to Xen or to Amazon AMI if fairly trivial. And tools like Citrix’ Project Kensho do this very effectively).  Management is where this really matters because the simplest way to consume IaaS cloud resources is when you can use your own tools for deployment, monitoring and reporting, administration, security, integration and life cycle management. And that simply isn’t the case today (thank you Amazon for letting enterprises finally manage cloud security with their own tools).

The same criticism can be levied at all Xen-based clouds today, too. Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid and several other hosters have published the APIs to their cloud platforms but only Amazon’s, thus far, have a realistic chance of reaching de facto standard status (especially when Eucalyptus and the Sun cloud – if it ever sees the light of day under Oracle – use the same APIs).

Interoperability requires consistent APIs – a subset at least – among cloud platforms. And VMware took this step today. It’s a pre-emptive move and a smart one to release its vCloud APIs [hyperlink to this announcement when it is published] and hand them over to the DMTF to manage as public APIs, because it lays the groundwork for a promise of better interoperability and compatibility between IaaS clouds (and enterprise internal and hosted clouds) when vCloud finally arrives. To try to ensure that their APIs can deliver this value, VMware also announced its vCloud Express program that asks for a commitment from cloud hosters to support and expose the vCloud API within their API set ensuring not only a clear conveyance through marketing that this cloud is compatible but giving the hoster the ability to differentiate around this API by intermingling it with their own unique functions.  This is a good move by VMware because this guidepost will be key for enterprises that want a cloud provider that can most closely match their in-house deployment. It also gives ISVs some runway to build their solutions and have them ready by the launch of vCloud in 2010.

It’s also competitively important in light of the momentum Amazon Web Services has with its APIs and this week’s announcement by Xen.org to raise its level of cloud compatibility.

This announcement has also moved the hypervisor wars to a new battlefield – programmability. Because at the end of the day, it’s less about how good your virtualization solution is (there’s a clear bar of function, performance and maturity that must be crossed – and XenServer and VMware both are over that bar); it’s how big your market share and how robust your ISV and hoster ecosystems are that matter. Xen has clear hoster ecosystem market share leadership in IaaS clouds. VMware brings the muscle of its enterprise and ISV market share to this battle.

The war is really just a skirmish today as still just a fraction of enterprise buyers are leveraging IaaS cloud services. Forrester survey data shows that while less than 10% of enterprises are leveraging IaaS clouds today, more than half plan to in the next 2-3 years so there’s a lot to be gained from victory. 

 Let the API wars begin!

August 31st, 2009

Xen.org: Stop the forking. Forrester: About time

Posted by James Staten @ 4:10 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Hypervisor, Xen, About Time Inc., Forrester Research Inc., Xen.org, Linux, Virtualization, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software

Xen.org, the open source community behind the leading IaaS cloud computing hypervisor finally made a bold move today by stepping up to the plate of delivering a complete open source virtual infrastructure for cloud platforms. Prior to this release, Xen.org had been content to manage and maintain the core Xen hypervisor and let its partners all build solutions around it. The problem with this approach was that while the hypervisor itself was compatible between these solutions the infrastructure and how you managed it were not. Compatibility at these higher layers is what is necessary for the Xen community to attract an ecosystem of ISVs and end customers – no one wants to have to tune their software for each and every Xen variant. Now Xen.org is delivering a complete product that IaaS clouds can more easily deploy, Linux distributions can deliver and that end customers can install knowing that storage, deployment, monitoring, reporting, policy-based automation and most other management tasks are consistently executed. This also makes Xen plus Eucalyptus a more complete cloud-in-a-box, open source solution.

Xen.org even went so far as to make the official Linux kernel the domain 0 for this solution, addressing a contentious point that rival hypervisor KVM had raised as its differentiator. Xen.org vendor partners can still choose to leverage just the hypervisor for integration with their own infrastructure and OS kernel technologies (as Sun has done with xVM) but there will be diminishing value in doing so with products aimed at the mainstream market, as compatibility will be broken at these higher levels. Oracle is one worth watching as its OracleVM uses Xen plus Oracle Unbreakable Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. Red Hat is unlikely to add the full Xen infrastructure as it has shifted to KVM as its strategic hypervisor. Could this be the opening Oracle has been waiting for to break away from Red Hat with its Linux (Is Unbreakable SuSE on the horizon)?

Clearly this move benefits Citrix’ aims as well. The company carrying the Xen.org flag will be contributing all its cloud-relevant technologies to this open source project including its StorageLink, virtual switch, virtual appliance, and VMware-to-Xen VM conversion (Project Kensho) technologies. Many early IaaS cloud leaders have their own solutions in these areas but are likely to welcome this IP so they don’t have to maintain their unique solutions long term/

Hopefully with this move the days of cloud incompatibility, at least between Xen-based clouds, will come to an end just a bit sooner.

August 27th, 2009

Amazon Web Services is addressing enterprises' top issues

Posted by James Staten @ 1:21 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Amazon Web Services, Web Service, Amazon.com Inc., EC2, Software Development, Security, Software/Web Development, Phil LeClare

Attention enterprises — Amazon Web Services LLC is serious about wanting your business. Over the past 6 months the cloud computing leader has made several enhancements to its services that specifically address the security concerns of enterprise infrastructure & operations (I&O) professionals as well as security & risk professionals. With these moves Amazon is slowly knocking down all the barriers to corporate adoption of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). These moves are likely to take many corporations from test to deploy.

Its latest moves to provide virtual private LAN connectivity to Amazon Machine Images and support multifactor authentication for administration follow a string of moves that have been demanded by enterprise IT shops. The key moves started early this year with the announcement of reserved instances that put a bit more billing predictability in place and make it more palatable to think about deploying an application on EC2 for the long term (Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently lowered the up-front fee for reserved instances making the pricing even more attractive). This was followed by greatly enhanced logging and reporting that lets application development managers and I&O pros better understand what’s happening with their applications and proactively act against potential infrastructure issues. It even enhanced the administrative interface giving users greater control and visibility.

The Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) solution isn’t much more than a supped up VLAN implementation but is one that enterprises will find very easy to use as the solution is an IPsec VPN gateway that speaks Cisco IOS 12.4 and Juniper OS 9.2. And you can bring your own IP addresses so that applications inside your data center and AMIs at EC2 share the same address space and subnet. You can use your normal management, policy enforcement, intrusion detection and other tools across this VPC as well. You can’t fully integrate your S3 volumes into this VPC (yet) but if you highly leverage Elastic Block Store this is less of an issue. There may be some latency impacts to this solution, but it’s a great improvement.

They can’t do anything about the security risks of multitenancy as this is fundamental to the solution — and key to the economic benefits — but these moves, in combination, make EC2 a much more secure and transparent deployment option than ever before. For many Forrester clients, multitenancy may be a show-stopper for some applications but don’t reject Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) compute clouds outright — a lot of non-critical or non-sensitive applications may fit very well on these types of environments and save your significant costs along the way.

Other IaaS clouds have similar capabilities to these just added to EC2. Some provide much deeper reporting, direct control over hardware firewalls and support for different MFA solutions so you definitely should shop around for the right deployment platform, but EC2 just got a lot more enterprise friendly.

Forrester recommends clients at least experiment with IaaS clouds today and that I&O publish a policy endorsing the use of these clouds for developer functional testing at a minimum. Now it is much easier to specify exactly how your use of these clouds should be configured to comply with corporate security policies.

August 26th, 2009

With DataSynapse, TIBCO looks to both present and future

Posted by James Staten @ 8:08 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: TIBCO Software Inc., DataSynapse, Mergers & Acquisitions, Corporate Law, Portals, Software Development, Middleware, Investment, Finance, Business Operations

TIBCO’s acquisition of DataSynapse for a reported $28 million gives the company a development team and mature products with which to expand its financial-services revenue and flesh out its TIBCO Silver cloud computing platform. The acquisition means two things to application development organizations:

1. TIBCO will use DataSynapse’s technology to support a variety of existing enterprise applications on its Silver cloud middleware. Silver, which is in beta test, today transposes new applications built in Java, C++, and several other languages to internal and public cloud infrastructure providers. DataSynapse’s FabricServer software will help customers adapt a variety of existing applications to cloud infrastructure as well. These include Java applications based on IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, and Red Hat JBoss, Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, IIS, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Informatica, and SAS Institute, and a variety of vertical-industry specialists. This is a substantial expansion of TIBCO Silver’s value to customers. 
2. TIBCO will now provide a product for running massively parallel workloads on grids of low-cost Intel servers. Data Synapse’s GridServer is used for this purpose by the company’s 83 listed customers, most of which are financial-services firms. TIBCO does not currently sell grid solutions, and so this will be add-on business, which is largely not integrated with TIBCO’s integration, BPM, BI, and portal products. Financial services, life sciences, telecommunications, and public-sector organizations use such grids to run big models and simulations.

The big promise of TIBCO’s acquisition of Data Synapse is obviously in the expansion of Silver its technology will enable. Forrester expects to see a tangle of Silver features from this acquisition during the second half of 2010 at the earliest, as TIBCO plans to ship the first release of Silver by the end of the second calendar quarter of 2010.

Forrester clients who have FabricServer installed today should feel good about this acquisition as it expands TIBCO’s reach for Silver and is thus strategic to its future direction. With stronger financial backing and the expanded sales force, TIBCO should be able to help push DataSynapse products well beyond its financial services beachhead.

The obvious question is around GridServer and if TIBCO will make the investment necessary to maintain as well as expand its presence in the grid computing market — or simply poach the technology purely for fleshing out Silver. We recommend GridServer customers take a cautious wait and see approach.

Customers considering TIBCO Silver should take a look at Fabric Server — making sure to understand its means of rehosting applications and how it provides shared services and scalability benefits as a sign of things to come from Silver.

Forrester’s John Rymer contributed to this post.

August 11th, 2009

VMware completes the PaaS to vCloud

Posted by James Staten @ 1:33 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Java, PaaS, VMware Inc., SpringSource, Microsoft Windows Azure, Virtualization, Hardware, Phil LeClare

If you’ve been wondering why an infrastructure leader would acquire a developer framework, the answer is a bit more complex that what shows on the surface — and a lot more strategic. As stated in the press release and in the blogs by VMware CTO Steve Herrod and SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson, the acquisition helps by, “creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds.” For the developer they will be able to use SpringSource tools to fully describe their application as a VMware vApp “a deployment blueprint that describes how the various machine images, middleware, and management components fit together and then we can take that blueprint and ‘make it so’ with a single click,” Johnson added in his blog. Infrastructure & operations professionals benefit because there will be less mystery to capacity planning, deployment and configuration, performance tuning and SLA creation for these applications, presumably making them easier to manage.

But that’s just the basics of this story. VMware has a bigger agenda SpringSource helps to fulfill making vCloud bigger than simply an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) alternative and keeping Microsoft at bay. Enterprises are already demanding that cloud environments and internal cloud solutions support their hypervisor standard VMware. So it wasn’t going to be a stretch to get vCloud adopted, assuming it delivered as promised. But the battle isn’t IaaS, it’s becoming the equivalent of the operating system for the next generation data center and you can’t achieve that aim without applications; and you can’t become application-relevant without being relevant to developers. While tools such as vCenter AppSpeed help to analyze the performance of applications so you could tune the infrastructure below them, merging this tool with SpringSource’s Hyperic gives visibility up into the application itself so performance experts from I&O and development can work together from the same information. There’s also room for presumption here that VMware will use the knowledge they will gain through this visibility (and the insights from the rest of the portfolio) to make vSphere and vCloud optimized for Java workloads. An integrated build-run-manage-deploy solution for Java sounds an awful lot like a strategy from Paul Maritz’ former company.

Microsoft Windows Azure is clearly the optimized cloud for .Net. Hook this together with Visual Studio, Hyper-V and System Center in the enterprise and you have a similar story. Both company’s offerings are incomplete today but the similarities are now clear.

The real question is who can spread their relevancy beyond their installed bases most effectively and since every enterprise has both, which you should you bet on. VMware clearly has dominant share in virtualized Windows workloads but that will wane over time as Microsoft cranks up its roadmap and marketing machine that story has already played out on VMware’s stock price. So VMware needs to drive up application stickiness. It’s been successful thus far in staying ahead of Microsoft with its roadmap and through building out its management portfolio. What it needs next is to get the OS out from between itself and the applications. Its first effort at this was its Virtual Appliance play with just enough operating system (JeOS). Step two will be tying SpringSource’s tc Server to vApp so that the OS in between is irrelevant for Java applications. Third is a play SpringSource has been driving for a while making its framework relevant to more than Java developers (or at least keeping Java developers from moving to other languages). These efforts thus far have included Groovy and Grails (a Ruby on Rails lookalike atop Spring), Spring .Net (for .Net developers) and plays toward ColdFusion, Adobe Flex and Javascript. Couple this with VMware’s application certification efforts with the majority of commercial applications and you have the beginnings of a very sticky platform.

My colleagues Mike Gualtieri, Jeffrey Hammond, John Rymer and I have recorded a podcast on this acquisition. You can listen to it here.

July 27th, 2009

Cloud DR services are real

Posted by Stephanie Balaouras @ 9:52 am

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Recovery, Information Technology, Service, Storage-as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery, Backups, Data Management, Phil LeClare

There is a lot of hype surrounding cloud and I’m usually not one to join the hype but in the case of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services (I’m trying to use the IT service continuity but it hasn’t caught on yet), these service are available today and they address major pain points in IT operations and organizations of all sizes can leverage these services, not just small and medium businesses.

Storage-as-a-Service is relatively new. Today the main value proposition is as a cloud target for on-premise deployments of backup and archiving software. If you have a need to retain data for extended periods of time (1 year plus in most cases) tape is still the more cost effective option given it’s low capital acquisition cost and removability. If you have long term data retention needs and you want to eliminate tape, that’s where a cloud storage target comes in. Electronically vault that data to a storage-as-service provider who can store that data at cents per GB. You just can’t beat the economies of scale these providers are able to achieve.

If you’re a small business and you don’t have the staff to implement and manage a backup solution or if you’re an enterprise and you’re looking for a PC backup or a remote office backup solution, I think it’s worthwhile to compare the three year total cost of ownership of an on-premise solution versus backup-as-a-service.

If you lack a recovery data center or if you’re looking for more a cost-effective solution for your Windows and Linux x86 server farms, I recommend that you evaluate new virtual recovery services. And for anyone who is about to renew their DR services contract, you should evaluate these new services before you resign for another three years of tape-based recovery to oversubscribed, shared IT hardware. These services fill the gap between DR services that rely on replication to dedicated IT hardware which are far too expensive for most organization and tape-based recovery to shared IT hardware, which while affordable, do not meet the recovery time and recovery point requirements of organizations from small to large and acoross industries.

And of course, if you’re focused on the availability and recovery of email in particular, well there is a laundry list of service providers that focus cloud-based services for email from including continuity of service, recovery, archiving and if you wanted to, just move your email to the cloud period.

These services already have a toehold in the US but in order to expand into Canada and to Europe, these service providers are busily opening up data centers in these regions. In Canada and the EU, data privacy laws restrict the transfer of data containing personally identifiable information out of region or to a country that doesn’t meet the standard of its own privacy laws.

Perhaps I’m too bullish on these services, perhaps organizations still have security concerns with cloud-based services but I think evey IT operations professional must now seriously consider these services when evaluating any backup or DR offering.

July 16th, 2009

Microsoft Office 2010: The odyssey continues

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 10:47 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Collaboration, Content Management, Information Workplace

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Forrester Research Inc., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Phil LeClare

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year.  The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office.  Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries.  The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

June 18th, 2009

Your Thoughts: How mature are cloud computing services?

Posted by James Staten @ 8:11 pm

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Amazon.com Inc., Forrester Research Inc., Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Phil LeClare

Enterprise IT infrastructure & operations professionals have many cloud computing technologies to choose from today, and new solutions seem to appear all the time. What are all these technologies? How do you categorize them? Which are mature and which need a lot of work?

Forrester is kicking off a TechRadar on the topic and wants your input. A Forrester TechRadar attempts to provide clarity about the types of technologies in a given category and plot their maturity today and the pace at which it is improving, as well as the level of business value this type of technology will bring to enterprise IT.

Forrester defines cloud computing as: a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via the Internet in a pay-per-use and self-service way. As a starting point, we have excluded Software as a Service (as Liz Herbert did a great TechRadar on SaaS already) and have carved up the rest of the cloud services into the technology categories below. Do we have them right? Are we missing any? If you have experience with any of the products in these categories (or others we didn’t mention) we want to hear your thoughts about them. How ready do you think these services are for enterprise consumption? Are they maturing quickly or is this area a wait and see?

Drop us a comment below or contact me directly at jstaten@forrester.com or on Twitter at Staten7. And thanks for your contributions to Forrester research.

Cloud computing technologies to be included in this report are: