Hybrid model
Dell’s Hyner made the point that over the past year, “what is clear is that enterprises have adopted a hybrid model, embracing public cloud where appropriate and continuing to invest in their own private cloud to run their most critical business applications”. Ireland, he added, “has a huge advantage when it comes to public cloud platforms” due to the fact that a number of the tech world’s “big players” have located their data centres in Dublin.
“This allows some parts of the Irish market to make use of the flexibility of a public cloud, without the common concern that the data would be located outside of the national boundary – something many other countries would love to have and don’t,” said Hyner.
“Customers who would never previously have trusted cloud-based infrastructure service providers are beginning to trial some workloads in the cloud, and run proofs-of-concept for hybrid cloud deployments,” Tadhg Cashman, Logicalis Ireland
The hybrid cloud discussion was also towards the top of the agenda for Richard O’Brien, IT director with Triangle. He said hybrid cloud has “firmly taken root in customers minds when looking at requirements for additional capacity, helped by the increase in the number of providers supporting ‘seamless’ extensions of a customer’s existing infrastructure” such as VMware’s vCloud Connector.
O’Brien added that he “expected to see further growth in this area, as customers can use their familiar on-premise management tools to manage their hybrid environment”.
For technology director and country leader with Oracle Ireland, Paul O’Riordan, two enterprise cloud service areas that “have got off to the fast start” of late are human resources — with human capital management applications finding a wide audience, while variations on sales-focused cloud resources are also finding favour.
“HR provided as a service, is absolutely a very hot market,” said O’Riordan. “We’re very excited about that and think it has huge potential. Then moving on to sales or CRM in the cloud we have what we feel is a much more complete proposition which works around sales, around marketing, around commerce, around service. We’re seeing a very big take up of that.”
Compliance
Elsewhere, John Halpin, sales specialist for cloud, enterprise servers storage and networking with HP, told TechPro, “the most popular enterprise cloud service for HP within the Irish market this year has been in the private cloud space. Utilising this approach allows customers to have full control over their applications and data provisioned internally within their organisation.”
Halpin added that to his mind, “organisations will need to implement a hybrid delivery strategy that leverages the right mix of cloud and traditional IT to optimise application and service creation and delivery,” if they are to embark upon a successful cloud policy.
While Qualcom technical director Mark Carragher said the impact that Microsoft Office 365 has had on the Irish market cannot be underestimated. It has, he said, been a “popular” purchase this year at all levels.
“With large enterprises seeking compliance around their email they are turning to it as a cost effective and simple way to ensure compliance as well as reliability,” said Carragher. “They can also create their own data loss prevention policies and policy tips for employees on how they are using email.”
Multi-device delivery
Carragher was quick to add that mobility is one of the main drivers behind enterprise cloud services at present. “With the availability of 4G and increased broadband speeds cloud features are now more viable and feature rich,” he said. “This means your people have the best tools available to them no matter where they are, so they can remain productive at all times.”
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