Hurford of DNS Europe: service providers and SaaS developers are showing enterprises how cloud is done

The antidote to cloud computing hype is, well, reality. For example: talking to people who are in the middle of working on cloud computing right now. We’ve started a whole new section of the ca.com website that provide profiles, videos, and other details of people doing exactly that.

One of the people highlighted on this list of Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators is Stephen Hurford of DNS Europe. DNS Europe is a London-based cloud hosting business with over 500 customers across the region. They have been taking the cloud-based business opportunities very seriously for several years now, and provide cloud application hosting and development, hybrid cloud integration services, plus consulting to help customers make the move to cloud.

I convinced Hurford, who serves as the cloud services director for DNS Europe, to share a few thoughts about what customers and service providers are – and should be – doing right now and some smart strategies he’d suggest.

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: From your experiences, Stephen, how should companies think about and prepare for cloud computing? Is there something enterprises can learn from service providers like yourself?

Stephen Hurford, DNS Europe: Picking the right project for cloud is very important. Launching into this saying “we’re going to convert everything” to the cloud in this short period of time is almost doomed. There is a relatively steep learning curve with it all.

But this is an area of opportunity for all of the service providers that have been using CA 3Tera AppLogic [like DNS Europe] for the last three years. We’re in a unique position to be able to help enterprises bypass the pitfalls that we had to climb out of.

Because the hosting model has become a much more accepted approach in general, enterprises are starting to look much more to service providers. They’re not necessarily looking to service providers to host their stuff for them, but to teach them about hosting, because that’s what their internal IT departments are becoming – hosting companies.

DCD: What is the physical infrastructure you use to deliver your services?

Stephen Hurford: We don’t have any data centers at all. We are a CSP that doesn’t believe in owning physical infrastructure apart from the rack inwards. We host with reputable Tier 3 partners like Level3, Telenor, and Interxion, but it means that we don’t care where the facility is. We can deploy a private cloud for a customer of ours within a data center anywhere in the world and with any provider.

DCD: When people talk about cloud, the public cloud is usually their first thought. There are some big providers in this market. How does the public cloud market look from your perspective as a smaller service provider? Is there a way for you to differentiate what you can do for a customer?

Stephen Hurford: The public cloud space is highly competitive – if you look at Amazon.com, GoGrid, Rackspace, the question is how can you compete in that market space as a small service provider? It’s almost impossible to compete on price, so don’t even try.

But, one thing that we have that Amazon and Rackspace and GoGrid do not have is they do not have is an up-sell product – they cannot take their customers from a public cloud to a private cloud product. So when their customers reach a point where they say, “Well, hang on, I want control of the infrastructure,” that’s not what you get from Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid. From those guys you get an infrastructure that’s controlled by the provider. Because we use CA 3Tera AppLogic, the customer gets control, whether hosted by a service provider or by themselves internally.

DCD: My CA Technologies colleague Matt Richards has been blogging a bit about smart ways for MSPs to compete and win with so much disruption going on. Where do you recommend a service provider start if they want to get into the cloud services business today?

Stephen Hurford: My advice to service providers who are starting up is to begin with niche market targeting. Pick a specific service or an application or a target market and become very good at offering and supporting that.

We recommend starting at the top, by providing SaaS. SaaS is relatively straightforward to get up and running on AppLogic if you choose the right software. The templates already exist – they are in the catalog, they are available from other service providers, and soon will be available in a marketplace of applications. Delivering SaaS offerings is the easiest technical and learning overhead approach and that’s why we recommend it.

DCD: Looking at your customer base, who is taking the best advantage of cloud platform capabilities right now? Is the area you just mentioned – SaaS – where you are seeing a lot of movement?

Stephen Hurford: Yes. The people who have found us and who “get it” are the SaaS developers. In fact, 90% of our customers are small- to medium-sized customers who are providing SaaS to enterprises and government sectors. It’s starting to be an interesting twist in the tale: these SaaS providers are starting to show enterprises how it’s done. They are the ones figuring out how to offer services. The enterprises are starting to think, “Well, if these SaaS providers can offer services based on AppLogic, why can’t I build my own AppLogic cloud?” That’s become our lead channel into the enterprise market.

DCD: How do service providers deal with disruptive technologies like cloud computing?

Stephen Hurford: From a service provider perspective, it’s simple: first, understand the future before it gets here. Next, push to the front if you can. Then work like crazy to drive it forward.

Cloud is a hugely disruptive technology, but without our low-cost resources we could not be as far forward as we are.

One of the fundamentally revolutionary sides of AppLogic is that I only need thousand-dollar boxes to run this stuff on. And if I need more, I don’t need to buy a $10,000 box. I only need to buy 4 $1,000 boxes. I have a grid and it’s on commodity servers. That is where AppLogic stood out from everything else.

DCD: Can you explain a bit more about the economics of this and your approach to keeping your costs very low? It sounds like a big competitive weapon for you.

Stephen Hurford: One of the big advantages of AppLogic is that it has reduced our hardware stock levels by 75%. That’s because all cloud server nodes are more or less the same, so we can easily reuse a server from one customer to another, simply by reprovisioning it in a new cloud.

One of the key advantages we’ve found is that once hardware has reached the end of its workable life in terms of an enterprise’s standard private cloud, it can very easily be repurposed into our public cloud where there is less question of “well, exactly what hardware is it?” So we’ve found we can extend the workable lifespan of our hardware by 40-50%.

DCD: What types of applications do you see customers bringing to the cloud now? Are they starting with greenfield apps, since this would give them a clean slate? The decision enterprises make will certainly have an impact for service providers.
Stephen Hurford: Some enterprises are taking the approach to ask “OK, how can I do my old stuff on a cloud? How do I do old stuff in a new way?” That’s one option for service providers – can I use the benefits of simplifying and reducing my stock levels, reducing my management overhead from my entire system by moving to AppLogic and then I won’t have 15 different types of servers and 15 different types of management teams. I can centralize it and get immediate benefits from that.

The other approach is to understand that this is a new platform with new capabilities, so I should look at what new stuff can I do with this platform. For service providers, it’s about finding a niche – being able to do something that works for a large proportion of your existing customers. Start there because those are the folks that know you and they know your brand. Think about what they are currently using in the cloud and whether they would rather do that with you.

DCD: Some believe that there is (or will soon be) a mad rush to switch all of IT to cloud computing; others (and I’m one of those) see a much more targeted shift. How do you see the adoption of cloud computing happening?

Stephen Hurford: There will always be customers who need dedicated servers. But those are customers who don’t have unpredictable growth. And need maximum performance. Those customers will get a much lower cost benefit from moving to the cloud.

For example, we were dealing with a company in Texas that wanted to move a gaming platform to the cloud. These are multi-player, shoot-‘em-up games. You host a game server that tracks all the coordinates of every object in space in real-time between 20 and 30 players and sends that data to the Xbox or PlayStation that renders it so they can play in the same gamespace. If you tried to do that with standard commodity hardware, you’re not getting the needed performance on the disk I/O.

The question to that customer was, “Do you have a fixed requirement? If you need 10 servers for a year and you’re not going to need to grow or shrink, don’t move to the cloud.” Dedicated hardware, however, is expensive. They said, “We don’t know what our requirements are and we need to be able to deploy new customers within 10 minutes.” I told them you don’t want to use dedicated servers for that, so you’re back to the cloud, but perhaps with a more tailored hardware solution such as SSD drives to optimize I/O performance.

DCD: So what do you think is the big change in approach here? What’s the change that a cloud platform like what you’re using for your customers is driving?

Stephen Hurford: Customers are saying it’s very easy with our platform to open up 2 browsers and move an entire application and infrastructure stack from New York to Tokyo. But that’s not enough.

Applications need to be nomadic. The concept of nomadic applications is way distant in the future, but for me, what we’re able to offer today is a clear sign-post for the future. Applications with their infrastructure will eventually become completely separated from the hardware level and the hypervisor. My application can go anywhere in the world with its data and with its OS that it needs to run on. All it needs to do is to plug into juice (hardware, CPU, RAM) – and I’ve got what I need.

Workloads like this would be liable to know where they are. By the minute, they’ll be able to find the least-cost service provisioning. If you’ve got an application and it doesn’t really matter where it is and it’s easy to move it around, then you can take advantage of least-cost service provisioning within a wider territorial region.

…

Thanks, Stephen, for the time and for sharing your perspectives. You can watch Stephen’s video interview and read more about DNS Europe here.

Cloud Expo: Some big ideas, big investments, and even a customer or two

Cloud computing events are happening fast and furiously now. SYS-CON’s Cloud Expo was last week in New York. Interop has a cloud computing track running in Las Vegas this week with a similar set of content to the recent Cloud Connect Santa Clara show. You really could spend all your time at cloud computing events these days.

I’ve been picking and choosing which events to sample to get a good feel for what’s going on in the market (a little bit of a science in and of itself). I won’t be at Interop but will be interested to hear how different the discussion is from what went on at Cloud Connect Santa Clara. However, I did hit the Cloud Expo show, and thought I’d share a few thoughts:

· I wasn’t shocked by the preponderance of vendor pitches. Why? First, the way SYS-CON is able to run the show is by offering speaking slots to its sponsors. The content logically follows suit. Think of it as a good way to sample what (some of) the players are saying and what they are focusing their investments on. If you know what you’re getting on your way into the door, you can evaluate the show for what it is, rather than for what you hope it could be. One note of caution, though: several big players (like Cisco) weren’t represented. Others -- like Oracle, shifting from cloud skepticism to full-on cloud cheerleader, and even smaller players -- took full advantage of that.

· Investment in cloud computing continues to grow, with signs of actual customers. These were two important data points that I took away from the event: the level of investment by the many players represented is strong. And, if you hold a cloud event in New York, some actual customers will show up. The general consensus seemed to be that the end users made up no more than 20% of the attendees based upon the number of folks raising hands in the various sessions. That’s certainly an uptick from the Santa Clara version of this same event. On the show floor, the 3Tera team thought it started slowly, but liked the customer traffic; the Nimsoft folks also had good things to say (they looked pretty busy from what I saw – a good sign).

· SYS-CON got a lot of flak for their fall Santa Clara show – and listened to some of it. I was one of the folks that had a pretty negative view of the previous conference. It may just be that the market is maturing, but I was pleasantly surprised that Jeremy Geelan and crew helped pushed the conversations in New York forward, as opposed to getting stuck on the “So how do you define cloud computing?” question repeatedly. That’s good to see. The next real improvement, though, will come when SYS-CON can convince the speakers to focus more on customer issues and less on sales pitches (see first bullet). There were certainly a few that did that, but not nearly enough. Hence, more grumbling about sales pitches.

· Big visions, modest means. One of telltale signs that we’ve got an interesting market developing – and aggressive innovation underway – around cloud computing is the healthy number of start-ups. One of those start-ups, Abiquo, decided to use a bit of its VC money to fund a stealth-until-the-day-of-the-show platinum sponsorship, giving them a big stage for their equally big vision. Their CEO painted a pretty interesting description of a “resource cloud” and a “top-down,” “high-level view of the future of cloud management.” They also talked about being focused on tactics for helping customers. Having been with vision-heavy Cassatt, I’m probably hypersensitive to the challenges I expect Abiquo to have trying to be simultaneously strategic & tactical (oh, and both open source & commercial, too). You can like their story, but remain skeptical that they can pull it off. Same with interesting ideas from folks like AppZero and CloudSwitch. But this wouldn’t be Silicon Valley if you didn’t try, right? Success doesn’t necessarily mean a huge customer base and an IPO anymore, after all.

· When your data center gets hung up in customs… If you thought Abiquo’s sponsorship was a last-minute thing, you should have seen Microsoft trying to get their containerized data center demo onto the show floor – and then get it working. Maybe it was intended to show off Tradeshow Booth as a Service (on-demand, you see) to add to the Microsoft as a Service mantra they were talking about. It’s actually pretty impressive: no one else but Microsoft gets to create a *aaS acronym from their own name and not get major grief. Something for us all to aspire to, I guess.

· A volcano puts the spotlight on the impact of Europe on the cloud computing market. The eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano and the resulting disruption of air travel across Europe made it very hard for many of the presenters scheduled for Cloud Expo to make it across the Atlantic to speak. But it also made another point: there are a bunch of European companies and personalities playing key roles in the cloud market. (See my earlier "scientists v. cowboys" post on cloud computing in Europe for some thoughts on this.) SYS-CON had pre-conference sessions with missing European presenters do some presentations using Skype. Others, like Mark Rivington from Nimsoft, sent U.S.-based replacements. Only a handful, however, showed true commitment: the aforementioned Abiquo folks were some of those. As I heard it, CEO Pete Malcom’s trip to New York started with a ferry from London to France and involved a VERY long drive to Madrid, before finally finding a plane able to head to the States. “I asked how he planned to get back,” noted Carl Brooks of SearchCloudComputing on Twitter. “He just laughed.” Diego Parrilla (known as @nubeblog on Twitter, specializing in Spanish-language cloud tweets) figures their true-to-life travel saga is worthy of a book. Describing the volcanic cloud of ash causing everyone’s troubles, he tied it to one of the hot topics of the day: “Now that was really cloud vendor lock-in!”

· The benefits of passion and a singular vision about cloud computing. I talked about the excitement that some of the start-ups showed for their ideas. That same excitement was obvious from Amazon, but for different reasons. I’ve heard folks discuss Amazon’s culture of secrecy from George Reese (@georgereese, CTO of enStratus) and others, but that didn’t come through. Instead I heard a very singular focus and world view. This was the first time I’d heard Steve Riley (@steveriley) of Amazon and he didn’t actually dismiss private clouds, but at the Cloud Camp session did a pretty good job of making it obvious he didn’t see a lot of use for them when there are public cloud alternatives (like, say, theirs). But the way I figure it, when your business plan is very precise, you can afford to be very passionate. And he is. And entertaining. Who else finishes up his of discussion of why private clouds aren’t really clouds by saying, “I can put a goat on my front lawn, but that doesn’t make it a lawnmower”?

· And, yes, the private cloud debate goes on… The Cloud Club Unpanel was debating that topic (including Steve Riley, as just mentioned), but most of the rest of the presentations took the private cloud as a given and moved on. As they should, at this point.

· For CA, a place for the new team begin to come together. For us, this event was also a good opportunity to bring the newest members of the CA Cloud Business Line team together in one place. The recent acquisitions of 3Tera and Nimsoft were the ones on display, and it was an excellent opportunity to get to know each other, talk about our different areas of focus and expertise, and make connections that are always best made face-to-face. We’ll be talking more about our latest and greatest (cloud and otherwise) at CA World in a few weeks, but there are obviously some great ways to build on the existing efforts of 3Tera and Nimsoft under the CA umbrella, especially for the benefit of MSPs and other cloud service providers. Stay tuned.

So, all in all, a useful event. Perfect? No.

I was glad to connect with a more East Coast-focused set of folks working on cloud computing. One of those people, Scott Sanchez at Unisys, did a write-up of his own that’s also worth a read.

At the very least, it was a good look around the industry as I help our various teams prepare for the big happenings at CA World. Hope to see you there.

Scientists v. Cowboys: How cloud computing looks from Europe

Is Europe following the U.S. on cloud computing...or vice versa?

While I was over in Berlin for a chunk of the summer, I had a chance to connect up with some of the discussions going on in Europe around cloud computing. It's true, high tech information these days knows no international boundaries. Articles that originally run in North American IT pubs are picked up wholesale by their European counterparts. New York Times articles run everywhere. Tweets fly across oceans. And a lot of technology news is read directly from the U.S. sources, websites, communities, and the like.

However, homegrown European publications are brimming with cloud computing, too. I found references to cloud in the Basel airport newsrack and the Berlin U-Bahn newsstands, all from local European information sources (and some of their reporters are excellent). European-based and -focused bloggers are taking on the topic as well; take a look at blogs like http://www.saasmania.com/ and http://www.nubeblog.com/. Even http://www.virtualization.info/, one of the best news sources on (you guessed it) virtualization, is run by Alessandro Perilli out of Italy. And, of course, there are big analyst contingents from the 451 Group (hello, William Fellows), Gartner, Forrester, and many others in various European enclaves.

The real question, though, is not only how are Europeans getting their cloud computing information (though I'm betting quite a few marketing folks are watching that topic closely). The real question is what are European customers doing about cloud computing now and how do they want to adopt this new operating model.

First things first: there are many, many European cloud companies

One strong indication that cloud is going to accelerate in Europe: the start-up ecosystem is growing. Just in the past few months I've run across folks like Berlin-based Zimory; Symetriq (from the city that their website and my memory tout as "beautiful and stimulating," Edinburgh, Scotland); Barcelona-based Abiquo -- just to name a few.

This week, EuroCloud launched in 7 European countries as an industry organization to promote cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Part of the group's raison d'être (do you like how I worked in a European language?) is to show that there's a vibrant group of companies ready, willing, and able to help get cloud computing going. Another is to help those same companies work through issues that could be putting limits on cross-border growth -- language and legal differences. Phil Wainewright wrote a good ZDNet blog on the EuroCloud launch.

Cloud adoption in Europe v. America: "It's the little differences"

But back to customer adoption.

When I ran European marketing program(me)s for BEA out of London in the early part of this decade, I got a real flavor for some fundamental differences in how the Europeans approach IT compared with their American counterparts. I'm betting this is going to hold true for the cloud computing uptake as well.

America: The Cowboys

Americans, true to a stereotype or two, seem to be the cowboys of new technology adoption. They shoot first, ask questions later. Good thing, too. This approach gives start-ups a way to get some early customers and evangelists who seem to enjoy the thrill of sticking their necks out. Mind you, there are plenty of organizations in the States where that's not the case (and the bad economy is probably putting a damper on some of them now), but I've seen lots of examples of this willingness to take a bit of a risk in hopes of a big pay-off.

Europe: The Scientists

What I saw while living and working in Europe was that despite their many cultures and distinct national personalities, Europeans on the whole are much more methodical and measured in their consideration of anything new. At least when it comes to IT purchases. Maybe it's why they come up with things like ITIL. They are much more about process. They want to make sure all the issues they will run into have been considered. Security? Governance? Compliance? Management? Disaster recovery? I hope you've thought those all through, Mr. Vendor. And, if you have, and can deliver solid answers, you're in luck. These guys will go big for whatever it is. However, getting all those pieces in place can take a while, so you'd better plan on that.

Cloud computing in Europe: the waiting game?

So, where does that put us regarding cloud computing?

I'm sure there are some good adoption stats from IDC or someone similar that answer the question (or give us predictions) in the specific. I know what the European start-ups and other vendors of cloudy wares in Europe are hoping: they are hoping that the folks in Europe are willing to take a leap sooner rather than later. And, they hope that they will take that leap with a European-based company.

But there's another possibility, one that is less hopeful that the hype is going convince someone, and one that matches my experience from my BEA days: they'll wait. I've seen them do it. As is more their style, the European IT buyers might wait for some of the big players who will pave the way and make things safe for them. Or, maybe some will split the difference and get help from an innovator with big backing like Zimory (who has funding from Deutsche Telekom).

The economy is a bit of a wildcard if you're trying to place your bets. Earlier in the year, while working as Cassatt, I reported some commentary from our partner Bull who said that the bad economy really hadn't affected them yet. I'm hoping to revisit that in an upcoming post, along with additional info I'm seeing on where things stand now.

(If events are any indication, things are looking good. Recent Cloud Camps in Frankfurt, Munich, northeast England have all seemed to get a lot of attention.)

Either way, it will be interesting. I'd love to hear your take on the hotbeds of European cloud activity, which European vendors are doing unique and innovative work, and where and how customers are starting their cloud computing implementations of one sort or another.

In the meantime, here are some suggested folks to follow on Twitter to stay in touch with the cloud computing goings-on in Europe:

@mastermark @rjudas @zimory @vtri @abiquo @nubeblog @saasmania @raesmaa @stephenmann @wif @bryanglick