“What all of that now allows is really good integration between applications and services,” Clark says. “Cloud has also matured beyond that big opaque thing to be much more transparent and with services capable of working just out of the box and blocks of them that are completely interplayable because they use open standards.”
From an enterprise software perspective we work in partnership with the likes of Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce.com for integration with Office 365 and so on. Companies that would have been seen as competitors in the past — and still are in many respects, of course — are working together and planning together because that is very much what our customers want, Art Coughlan, Microsoft
Global alliances
Illustrating the common hymn sheet from which so many leaders are now playing, Microsoft has also embraced open standards, hybrid cloud and global alliances to deliver the technology and services that the corporate market requires. “From an enterprise software perspective we work in partnership with the likes of Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce.com for integration with Office 365 and so on,” says Art Coughlan, cloud and enterprise lead in Microsoft Ireland. “Companies that would have been seen as competitors in the past — and still are in many respects, of course — are working together and planning together because that is very much what our customers want.”
Microsoft today is working closely with the open source community, he emphasises, especially around its infrastructure solutions like Azure and .NET. “Instead of looking at the cloud as something like the world’s biggest ICT tool kit we have focussed on providing finished services that actually allow people to work in a hybrid, integrated way,” he explains. “Active Directory on Azure, for example, is there to integrate third party SaaS applications. They can have single sign-on through a single portal for combinations like Office 365, Salesforce.com and Box.com.”
Standards adherence
“Adherence to standards is essential, open standards and de facto industry technical standards, and the key to being effective in this hybrid cloud world. Microsoft contributes by publishing API standards for third parties, enforcing security models and ourselves complying with international standards set by independent third parties. In what is now a kind of supply chain of services there needs to be a heightened of commercial awareness of standards and the role that each party plays, especially brokers and agents. The customer using the services needs to be fully aware of what is involved. PCI standards offer a very good example, where everyone involved at the business level needs to be assured of security and compliance to the required standards.”
As well as being the doyen of SaaS and world leader in CRM, Salesforce.com has built up a huge business as a cloud platform provider (PaaS). “To give an idea, of the three billion or so transactions per day on Salesforce.com about 50% are API calls — about half of the traffic on our service is from other apps or services interacting with it,” explains Carl Dempsey, VP of sales engineering in Salesforce.com EMEA.
“Our customers have built over four million apps on our platform, including a very strong set of ISV relationships including, for instance, Sage. Most of them however are apps that our customers have developed to extend and enrich their own use of Salesforce.com. There is also our AppExchange, with over 2,700 business apps to choose from.”
Legacy handling
The key point is that cloud delivers the speed, agility and the ability to transform business that the market seeks today, Dempsey says. “Legacy systems are there and will be for no one knows how long. But they are also in large measure evolving away from on-premise to cloud in some form. We acknowledge that we have to work with those legacy systems — a high proportion of those 1.5 billion API calls are from such applications. Earlier this year we announced Lightning Connect for real-time access through Salesforce.com to literally any external data source. It then all performs as if it were part of the Salesforce cloud.”
More than nine out of 10 European enterprises now favour cloud service providers that can orchestrate end-to-end management across networks and data centres. That’s what the study found and it’s certainly what we are seeing, in the Irish market as elsewhere. It is in part at least driven by that perennial business motivation, the wish to pick and choose what best suits the organisation in the judgment of its leadership, Barry McMahon, BT Ireland
The arguments are no longer about cloud versus on-premise, Dempsey suggests. “There are some businesses that can be virtual and some that seem inexorably location-bound — although most of those are looking to cloud for some services. The real cloud discussion today is entirely practical — what can work, what would work best, can all of these applications and activities be integrated?”
It’s not exactly an elephant in the computer room, but as Barry McMahon, BT Ireland’s lead for cloud and data centre services, points out there is no definitive definition of ‘cloud’ in an industry otherwise dominated by technical and other standards. “So cloud can mean different things according to different vendors and it’s really no wonder at all that so many solutions are hybrid — by any standards. In Europe a survey last year showed that over 40% of enterprise expected to be managing a hybrid, multi-cloud environment by next year.”
Trusted broker
This was an Ovum study, sponsored by BT and Cisco, focusing essentially on the rising need for a trusted broker when working with cloud services. “More than nine out of 10 European enterprises now favour cloud service providers that can orchestrate end-to-end management across networks and data centres. That’s what the study found and it’s certainly what we are seeing, in the Irish market as elsewhere. It is in part at least driven by that perennial business motivation, the wish to pick and choose what best suits the organisation in the judgment of its leadership.”
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