The common industry wisdom that Ireland trails behind the UK and US in terms of cloud service adoption may soon become a thing of the past according to several cloud experts. While some of those questioned by ComputerScope did estimate that Ireland is "anything up to a year" behind certain nations, many, such as Triangle technical director Richard O’Brien felt this theory could be "a little out of date" already.
Graham Fagan, BT’s head of innovation and development, concurred with O’Brien. "I don’t believe there is any specific stand out service that flourishes internationally and has not made some level of an impact locally," said Fagan.
"Ireland," he said, "is a very internationalised market with a large number of multinational companies who are in many instances on the leading edge of some of these developments. I think it’s more a question of overall adoption rates of these services within mainstream organisations."
Addressing differences with the UK market directly, Fagan said that up until last year Irish companies may have "lagged" behind in terms of adoption rates, however, he added, "results from last year show we are now on a par with UK cloud adoption which is very interesting".
Anecdotal Evidence
Fagan has heard plenty of "anecdotal" evidence that more organisations are beginning to have a defined strategy for cloud computing and "more importantly they are starting to execute against that strategy". Davin Cody, HP Ireland’s cloud lead for enterprise servers, storage and networking made the point that a growing "entrepreneurial drive" around the country is helping to close the gap in cloud services adoption as well.
"We are all aware," said Cody, "that start-up companies are embracing cloud and as we see more favourable economic data we will probably see the number of new organisations growing." He would also add though that cloud adoption will focus "predominantly" on the areas of software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), adding that Irish businesses will likely remain behind the crowd when it comes to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions for now.
It is a point John Sheridan, cloud services development manager with Datapac agreed upon, saying that he believed IaaS "still has a way to go in Ireland". Sheridan did add though that the solution "will grow significantly as a market in Ireland over the next three years" and that "once the service providers have the right solutions in place and they become fully trusted, demand will flourish here".
Tadhgh Cashman, infrastructure services director of Logicalis, noted that many businesses "in the private sector intuitively want to look at IaaS offerings, including hybrid and public, yet come back again and again to the deployment of private cloud infrastructures, since the Irish market doesn’t have the same depth of experience with large scale hybrid and public cloud integrated IT service delivery models".
Elsewhere, MD with Savenet Solutions, Lorcan Cunningham agreed with both Cody and Sheridan that IaaS is not as widespread as it could be here, but also felt many Irish organisations are dragging their heels in terms of PaaS, hybrid cloud services, cloud storage, cloud data archiving, cloud-based back-up and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).
Indeed, several cloud experts said DRaaS was a concept Irish businesses could be more open to, with both PFH Technology Group commercial and operations director, Paul Callaghan and Oracle Ireland senior sales director, Jon Paul noting that there’s plenty of room to "increase interest" in this sector of the cloud market.
Not quite there
However, Triangle’s O’Brien felt that in fact there is "quite a lot of interest from a disaster recovery perspective" in Ireland, and in reality it’s "the services that are available" which "aren’t quite ‘there’ yet".
Speaking about other areas where Irish cloud adoption could improve, Commtech GM Gerry Harvey told ComputerScope that Irish businesses are "only setting out now to look at cloud-integrated storage (CIS) which offers a great combination of the best of the old and new worlds". Explaining the advantages of CIS in a little more detail, Harvey said, "IT teams still manage their storage as one ‘whole’ but they just happen to have some percentage of that ‘whole’ in the cloud. They can still essentially manage everything as if it were the in-house."
In terms of overall cloud adoption-whether it’s CIS, IaaS, SaaS or any other service of a similar ilk-Vincent in’t Veld of Interxion felt that while Irish businesses are lagging behind other nations, they are not alone. In fact, he said, "it goes across Europe".
The director of marketing and business development for Interxion’s cloud segment said this trend simply "goes back to the origins of the technology" when "major technology leaders in the US" migrated functions to the cloud far quicker than their rivals or partners elsewhere.
Old and new
Addressing which cloud services are actually being utilised by Irish businesses at present, PFH’s Callaghan said "traditional" applications like email filtering, CRM and online backup remain popular, adding that "other SaaS offerings we frequently come across are those in areas such as HR and service management".
Commtech’ s Harvey agreed that applications are the driving force for many companies venturing into the cloud. "Businesses shortcut the lead time from business process identification to actual process provisioning," added Harvey, who noted that quite often these cloud services are bought "completely outside of traditional IT management".
"A good example is CRM," continued Harvey, "where sales managers want a forecasting, order and customer management system [and] they bypass in-house IT and use online sales automation."
IaaS consideration
As alluded to earlier by several of our cloud experts, while IaaS adoption may not be widespread, PFH’s Callaghan did say that interest in the area is growing. He made the point that with so many Irish businesses "sweating server assets over the past few years" when it gets to the point of a system refresh they are "giving serious consideration to IaaS".
Oracle sales director Paul felt the advantages presented by IaaS will be difficult to ignore. "It gives you the benefit of both worlds, you have the control and comfort that [data] is within your data centre or your third party data centre, but you have all the benefit of the flexible capacity on demand," said Paul. "You can scale up, scale down and the commercial structure allows you to take it on a service basis."
Noting that IaaS investment particularly suits businesses in a "growth mode or anybody with an unpredictable demand", Paul added that data heavy industries such as "life sciences, financial services, insurance, telcos, gaming companies and retailers" could all benefit from opting for the IaaS model.
Examining other cloud-focused areas of interest for Irish businesses, Tim Murphy, CEO with Cork-based Strencom, felt that unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is proving to be an attractive option for many businesses as it delivers "productivity and cost savings for voice, conferencing, and collaboration across organisations".
Internationally though, Murphy backed up other experts by noting that DRaaS is flourishing outside our shores. "60% of companies would be in serious trouble after 48 hours without their data, so it’s no surprise" that these options are making an impact with international SMEs in particular said the Strencom CEO.
DRaaS solution
Whether or not they feel Irish cloud culture is struggling to keep pace with European and global counterparts, the experts who spoke to ComputerScope felt there will be some significant changes to the cloud marketplace here over the coming year.
PFH’s Callaghan felt that aforementioned DRaaS-gap will be addressed for one thing, with "small to mid-market size companies", who have struggled to implement effective DR plans given "the cost of replicating live environments" before now, being the main customers. Triangle’s O’Brien also hoped movement towards DRaaS will increase, due mainly to better options on the market for Irish businesses to choose from.
Said O’Brien, "in the next 12 to 18 months there will be increased interest because some of the bigger cloud providers are beginning to adapt now and making moves to switch on DR services for smaller companies and offer a robust set of services. The clients want it anyway."
O’Brien also told ComputerScope that "it will be interesting to see in that time whether people will start to move towards desktop to the cloud because I’ve noticed a couple of big wins in the UK around that".
"Some of the public sector there has basically outsourced the provisioning of desktops to cloud service providers. Plus in Ireland there’s certainly there’s a lot of stuff going on here in the health sector around desktop, there’s some great stories around healthcare in fact-in places such as Beaumont Hospital-and it’s an area that doesn’t get much good press!" said O’Brien.
Increased connectivity
Elsewhere, Strencom’s Murphy felt "hosted voice and unified communications"-driven by increased connectivity options which will, it’s hoped, greatly impact the Irish market in 2014-will be major areas of interest as well.
Harvey also sees cloud-based unified communications as offering a "very real potential for Irish business to leapfrog a generation to the virtualised enterprise with switchless voice now fully available to deliver cloud based voice communications service".
Cloud contact centre
BT Ireland-man Fagan admitted that it won’t be a "major surprise" that the company feels communications-focused services will be on the increase over the next year. The head of innovation and development backed up his argument by talking about the possibilities available in terms of "cloud contact centre" in particular though.
"By blending email, social media, web chat and voicemail with intelligent routing and traditional voice technologies organisations can create a multi-channel contact centre at minimum expense in the cloud," said Fagan. "They only pay for services they need, when they need them, they can easily adjust for seasonal spikes or unexpected events without unnecessary expense."
Looking ahead into 2014, HP Ireland’s Cody said to expect "an increase in the number of applications available in the cloud" which will inevitably have an impact on adoption rates. While Oracle’s Paul focused on changes in the "size and complexity of SaaS deployments" as being an area to watch out for. "They are going to increase, where people will start taking much larger systems and basing those out of the cloud," he said taking the example of "core" financial and ERP systems.
"We’ve seen the start of people moving ERP systems to the cloud," he said, adding a refresh of financial systems is a long term investment and as people gain more confidence that the cloud can handle such responsibility, deployments will increase.
For Logicalis’ Cashman though, the next year or two may not be all that different in some respects to what’s gone before. "We have seen a strong growth in the sale of private cloud enabling technologies over the past two years and believe this will continue to be the predominant cloud deployment model for the foreseeable future," said the infrastructure services director.
Interxion director Vincent in’t Veld also felt there may not be "any major new technologies" in the cloud space over the coming year or so, but one area of major development will be companies "looking at how to design, operate and manage hybrid solutions".
Elaborating, in’t Veld added, "When it comes to really starting to shift more volume, and more business critical workloads onto the cloud then people are, at the moment, at the phase of defining that roadmap and that migration process.
"For this, [they’re] leaning heavily on the technology and knowledge suppliers in the market to help them define that roadmap. It’s almost an application-led approach, deciding what fits best where and what needs to be fixed as it were-that’s what’s driving the IT enterprise. That’s where I see development."
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