Outsourcing RIP. Long live cloud services-on-steroids
- Summary:
- As the new IBM/SoftLayer London datacenter gets down to business it shows that large enterprises may now be ready to not only accept that cloud services work but frees them up to invest in more valuable projects than just keeping the IT lights on.
The recent official unveiling of the new SoftLayer/IBM London datacenter, first heralded in the middle of last year, brought with it more evidence that there is a shift happening amongst the enterprise user community towards not just cloud services, but towards the packaged, full service model that frees up IT resources for more productive work than simply keeping the lights burning.
Speaking at the event, SoftLayer CTO, Marc Jones, identified a shift in the type of business being attracted. This is, in no small part, due to the company’s acquisition by IBM, but the shift is fast enough to be notable:
Softlayer was largely bare metal services as this was our primary business. But since the IBM acquisition we have seen a lot more enterprise customers: at the moment it splits roughly down the middle and is continuing to grow. We also have the enterprises moving down the hybrid cloud route, already doing cloud bursting and building up as they add more services to their cloud environments.
This plays to the aims of IBM to become a focus for full-service cloud service provision, upto and including what might be termed `hybrid SaaS’, managing all aspects of the customers’ requirements as a packaged service deliverable.
It also aims to offer this type of service on a global basis, with some 20 datacenters operating around the world and others still to come as part of the company’s on-going $1.2 billion investment programme.
According to Doug Clark, IBM’s head of cloud in the UK and Eire, the second half of last year saw a tipping point for enterprise clients going all-in on hybrid cloud services. The company now has partnerships with a growing number of applications and tools providers, such as Twitter, Intel, Docker, Microsoft, SAP and Apple:
Our aim now is to be able to put the right bundles of services and infrastructure together for users so we can offer them agility and choice. And with SoftLayer we have the foundation of the IBM cloud portfolio. It is also a business that has real brand value in its own right.
This position puts IBM in the position to offer enterprises the services of a `virtual IT department’, running and managing existing applications, increasingly sourcing them in the future, and providing the resources on which they all run. This is an operational model that frees enterprises up to concentrate on adding value to the business through apps development rather than just keeping their own `lights on’.
Pods
The new London datacenter, housed in the Digital Realty facility in Chessington, is built on SoftLayer’s established `pod’ architecture, where every datacentre is built to a standard format using standard 4-pod layout and standard compute, storage and networking resources.
These resources are based on the pre-IBM model of providing bare metal systems. However, while that pre-IBM model was pitched at customers looking for bare metal resources, the shift in market demand post-IBM has moved the model to an essentially Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) model, as Jones noted:
Every server can be whatever type of resource that is needed. So we now offer everything from bare metal through to multi-tenant shared services.
According to Clark, the bare metal option is now starting to find enterprise traction for big data analytics applications. At the other end of the enterprise time-line the company also has available APIs for integrating many established back office applications and tools from the world of IBM mainframes and mid-range business systems, to the point where he suggests that `everything’ is now available to participate directly in hybrid cloud environments.
Such environments are now also built to full open standards. The company is now, Clark claimed, the second-largest contributor of code and technology resources to the OpenStack Cloud Foundry Foundation which is geared to extending the infrastructure standard so that it can offer Platform-as-a-Service as well.
This, too, maps onto the direction IBM/SoftLayer is taking towards providing an ever-greater IT services resource for enterprises.
My take
This is more evidence that at least some of the major vendors and service providers see a shift coming as enterprises not only become more comfortable with the idea of cloud services, but are looking to exploit them to provide a significant reworking of the old 'outsourcing’ business model, this time with added flexibility, scalability and business agility.