There's a shift going on -- from workloads that are run in traditional enterprise IT settings, to workloads that make more sense to run using an IT service provider who's a specialist.
We believe that we, as EMC, can grealy help to accelerate this transition in a variety of ways -- by helping to create a supply of workloads that are ready to move to qualified IT service provider settings.
"How?", you might ask.
I didn't realize it at the time, but when EMC started to offer remote replication data protection capabilities way back in 1995 with SRDF, we were actually creating a market for service providers.
With DR, distance is good. The more distance, the more protection. Besides the obvious network costs, there's usually a need for a separate data center facility, staff, etc. Some organizations are big enough to already have that in place, others go looking for someone to do that for them.
As we got more involved in large-scale backup and recovery, the same scenario played out. Having your backup data at a remote site is a good thing. And a lot of people go looking to consume that as a service, rather than doing it themselves.
More recently, we've had similar experiences in security via RSA: everyone needs things like security information event management (SIEM via enVision) and corporate-wide governance management (via Archer) -- there's a certain rationale to consume these things as an external service or watchdog function.
Other examples exist, but the first theme is clear -- EMC has historically targeted parts of the IT market that tend to generate demand for external IT services.
Creating Demand For IT Service Providers -- More Recent
The next wave of demand generation should be pretty familiar to everyone -- it's virtualization.
As EMC and other vendors drive our customers to progressively virtualize more and more of their IT landscape, there's an interesting phenomenon -- the virtualized workloads become more mobile.
Put differently, if you -- as an IT or business user -- are already comfortable with the idea of not physically "owning" the hardware for your specific application using your own dedicated server, it's not much of a leap to have those physical (now virtual) resources provided externally.
And, indeed, that's what we see happening. The move from inside to outside is lagging virtualization trends by about 18-24 months. Two years ago, people were starting to virtualize their non-critical applications: test and dev, low-priority apps, etc.
These are the very same app workloads that are now starting to be shopped around to various IT service providers. And we're doing our part by creating enabling technology (e.g. VPLEX working with VMware and other environments) that make application movement -- and subsequent control by the IT group -- a far more expedited proposition.
This also provides some indication of the future as well. Right now, larger IT organizations are busily at work virtualizing more important and critical applications: Exchange, Oracle, SAP, Sharepoint, etc. I'd fully expect for these to start to be shopped around in the next 18-24 months as well.
Creating Demand For IT Service Providers -- Right Now
In a recent post on my other blog, I shared how EMC had teamed up with a major consultancy to provide a "Cloud Strategic and Economic Diagnostic" -- essentially, a targeted consulting engagement that establishes the business case for larger enterprise IT organizations to consider cloudifying their landscapes -- and dramatically increasing their use of external service providers.
It's not that using external IT services providers is a good idea or a bad idea -- it's that we realized that most IT leaders and planners just don't know what's possible these days. By creating a quick, repeatable diagnostic to help them understand the potential, we're seeing more IT strategies shift in preference of increased use of external service providers.
Even in verticals that you'd think would never consider it -- like financial services.
The more we do these engagements, the more demand there will likely be for enterprise-class IT service providers.
Creating Demand For IT Service Providers -- The Road Ahead
If you've been following various industry discussion, this one shouldn't be too much of a surprise -- it's getting enterprises and application developers to write a new generation of applications that are "cloud ready" -- e.g. designed to work in geographically-distributed, infrastructure-agnostic setting while still retaining full control of service delivery, security, GRC, etc.
Ground zero for this in our world is SpringSource (a VMware company, and I guess indirectly an EMC company). Write an app in Spring (large or small), and moving portions to external service providers isn't the big deal that it was using more traditional approaches.
But rewriting application portfolios takes an inordinate amount of time and effort. That being said, in many enterprises, there are new enterprise-grade applications being created on a continual basis. Get them to use Spring (or a compatible approach), and -- over time -- there will be far more "service provider friendly" workloads than there are today.
Supply -- And Demand
Most technology vendors see themselves as suppliers, especially to service provider partners.
Yes, we'd like to be the #1 provider for service providers, but we think the best way we can do that is by doing everything we can to stimulate industry demand for these very services.
And there's still more to do :-)
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