Techaisle Analyst Insights

Techaisle’s detailed survey on Hybrid Cloud Adoption trends covering small, midmarket and enterprise firms shows that although Amazon AWS has established its initial presence within the US businesses, Microsoft Azure is quickly becoming the cloud platform of choice.

Microsoft Azure, a public cloud computing platform, is a growing collection of integrated cloud services that includes analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web. Microsoft Azure initially focused strictly on PaaS but has now entered into IaaS market and launched a technical preview of Azure Stack, a platform designed to allow business to deploy an on-premise private cloud and manage a hybrid cloud environment. Microsoft Azure offers Hyper­-V-­virtualized multi-tenant compute with multi-tenant storage along with many additional IaaS and PaaS capabilities, including object storage and a CDN, Azure Marketplace which offers various third party software and services and Azure ExpressRoute that meets the colocation needs of various small and medium businesses.

The respondents for the survey were CIOs, CSOs, CTOs, VP of IT, Director of IT, Senior manager of IT as well as key business decision makers responsible or influential in adopting cloud platforms within their organizations.

Businesses cited many different reasons as to why Microsoft Azure is becoming a platform of choice.

Data from Techaisle’s study channel partners (research analysis documented in Techaisle’s series of reports either delivered individually or as Channel Partner Research Annual subscription service) tell fascinating stories. Excerpt from the specific study of 650 US channel partners selling managed services, based on Techaisle’s database of over 250,000 partners, shows that the sales cycle length varies not only by line of business, but also by expertise levels:

• Cloud provider channel, on average takes 2 weeks longer in its sales cycle as a cloud provider channel
• Systems Integrators’ average sales cycle is ~1.5X of VARs because of complexity of SI’s engagement with an SMB. VARs, are often selling products into existing accounts, have relatively short sales cycles, while SIs, who are positioning complex solutions, have longer sales cycles than other channel businesses
• Even a consultant who is usually familiar to an SMB organization has to prove that they are the right partner and it involves building a plan and showcasing why their advice and solution would be ideal for SMBs

More fascinating are the four charts below.

The rise in virtualization has been driving an accompanying demand for converged infrastructure or hyperconvergence: products that combine processing, storage and networking into a robust and scalable unit that can support and respond to the options inherent in virtualization. While the migration from separate server, storage and networking products to converged infrastructure is still in its early stages, the Techaisle SMB virtualization & converged infrastructure survey shows that it is beginning to gain traction, especially within more sophisticated SMB accounts.

Scale computing, launched in 2008, based out of Indianapolis with development in San Francisco bay area and offices in London, Paris, Toronto and Dubai made its SMB focused hyperconvergence launch at VMworld in 2012. Since then Scale Computing has implemented over 6,000 systems in a little over 1,600 customers.

As per Techaisle’s SMB virtualization and converged infrastructure survey, the key barriers to adopting hyperconvergence within SMBs are high cost of implementation, infrastructure disruption during roll-out, greater-than-anticipated time and resource investment, and the complexity of integrating new infrastructure units with existing infrastructure. For example, a pet peeve of SMBs when using VMware on HP Proliant DL380 G8 is their inability to use cloud migration to upgrade or add G8 or G9. These are the issues that Scale Computing is trying to address. In defense of VMware, although the initial code base of ESX was never built to be self-aware, VMware is working on it.

Recent work by Techaisle shows that the need for channel management imperatives has expanded beyond the tactical questions of sales or management metrics or marketing activities. Techaisle has identified twelve fundamental areas where conventional wisdom has not kept pace with the fast emerging business needs of the channel. Channel policies based on conventional wisdom and past history is leading channel organizations away from the practices needed to compete successfully in the cloud market. Techaisle has developed 12 points for transformation of SMB channels table to illustrate ways that channel organizations must alter basic attitudes towards their business in order to be successful in the current and future IT market. Table below compares old model with new model with imperatives that are losing relevance with those that are emerging.