| Distributed workloads | |
| “SME organisations are no longer purchasing physical infrastructure to the same degree any more. Traditional forms of infrastructure and software are now being consumed as commodity services over the network” |  eircom Business Solutions: Enda Doyle, director, Business Development and Innovation |
| The trend of continued dominance of network-delivered, cloud-based services is having a dramatic effect on the server infrastructure businesses. Traditional suppliers such as IBM, HP, Dell etc. are having to change their operating models to survive in a market that is experiencing a seismic change in shape. SME organisations are no longer purchasing physical infrastructure to the same degree any more.Traditional forms of infrastructure and software are now being consumed as commodity services over the network in the same way as electricity generation moved from on-site to over-the-grid in the last century. For larger organisations, hybrid models dominate the landscape whereby infrastructure and software-based loads are distributed as appropriate over the network using a mix of dedicated infrastructure, private cloud and public cloud platforms depending on the specific business requirement.Platform providers such as Cisco, Avaya, Oracle, etc. are fighting to hold back the attack from cloud services by mimicking the flexibility of pay-as-you-use commercials combined with multiple forms of infrastructure in the one pod of technology — using flexible licensing to enable features. The net effect of this market shift is twofold. Firstly, traditional models for local delivery of physical infrastructure is in effect disappearing due to the simplicity and cost effectiveness of network delivered Software and Infrastructure.Secondly, physical Infrastructure is being commoditised more and more into the build-out of large cloud super-centres for the delivery of IaaS. Global cloud providers are flexing their scale and dominance to specify generic non-branded components that are plugged into a large cloud infrastructure to be delivered as a service over the network. Margins for traditional infrastructure providers is being swallowed by cloud providers. All of this is good news to businesses at all levels. Apart from lowering costs, it gives much more choice into the hands of the consumer to negotiate with providers of these services — it is no longer a multi-year investment with any one vendor, with immediate built-in upgrade and maintenance costs that existed in the last millennium!
|
|
Ltd
