Fun with market sizing I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with cloud market-sizings, and occasioanlly on them. They’re always a bit whackadoodle and can be difficult to pull apart. But, so long as they’re consistent year of year, they do give a good intedication of momentum and a comparision to other markets. This is what you should be using emerging technology marketsizing for: just indications of which way the wind is blowing and how strong that wind is relative to other breezes.
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Software Defined Businesses need Software Defined IT Departments
(I originally wrote this April 2015 for FierceDevOps, a site which has made it either impossible or impossibly tedious to find these articles. Hence, it’s now here.)
Quick tip: if you’re in a room full managers and executives from non-technology companies and one of them asks, “what kind of company do you think we are?”…no matter what type of company they are, the answer is always “a technology company.” That’s the trope us in the technology industry have successfully deployed into the market in recent years.
More on HP's cloud re-positioning, AWS financials
More on HP’s cloud re-positioning:
“HP is not leaving the public cloud market,“ said HP in a statement to CRN that mirrors a statement given earlier this week to VentureBeat. “We run the largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud out there. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players.”
They’re going “enterprise” that is. And if you pay attention to analyst predictions and their surveys of what companies say they want to buy (mostly private and “hybrid cloud”), that’s likely OK.
"Managed cloud" and MSP market-sizing
Global cloud and data center-delivered managed network services doubled in size from $1,384 million in 2009 to $2,606 million in 2015, according to a report from Statista, a New York City research firm. While those seem like impressive growth numbers, the MSP Alliance has estimated managed services revenue generated by cloud and managed service providers (MSPs) in North America during 2014 equaled $154 billion. In addition, 451 Research predicts that the value of managed services from cloud service providers will grow from $17 billion in 2014 to $43 billion in 2018.
Betting on the Software Defined Business for growth
I had lunch with Israel Gat yesterday. Lobster bisque in a sourdough bread bowl, to answer your first question. We were talking about the concept of a “software defined business” (and I was complaining about how HEB needs more of that, if only to get digital Buddy Bucks).
The question came up, so will companies really do this “software defined business” stuff (that’s the phrase I like for “third platform," “digital enterprise,” horseman style jabber-jargon)?
s/SOA/microservices/g
After a thrilling Tweeter-thread on SOA vs. microservices, I thought I’d just playing with some old text, here:
Decomposing an online store like Amazon.com, for example, into its fundamental piece parts yields a set of services - among them: a presentation service to deliver the HTML, a search service to find appropriate items, a shopping cart service and a credit card verification/payment service to check out and purchase items. While many speak of microservices purely in terms of RESTful services, it’s RedMonk’s view that RESTful services are not a prerequisite for delivering a microservices.
The new industry analysts, again
Never mind journalism, it’s industry analysts who are being disrupted.
I keep coming across a new crop of IT industry analysts who end up getting compared incorrectly to journalists. It’s little wonder as most people have little idea what an industry analyst does; it’s not like analysts, hidden behind their austere paywalls, help much there.
People like Horace Dediu, Ben Thompson, and others are experimenting with ways to disrupt industry analysts.
Advice for being an industry analyst
Occasionally, my fellow analysts ask me for advice on being an analyst. Here’s an edited up version of one of my recent emails:
Learn how to listen to yourself, focus You have to learn to trust your intuition about what you focus on, your own style and voice, and, most importantly for monetization, how you market yourselves. The last point is important for commercial success: in most cases, the (analyst) company you work for will do a poor job marketing you compared to how well you can market yourself.
As the new space intended, I’ve formed interesting, unexpected bonds with my cohorts. But my personal performance at work has hit an all-time low. Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s like being in middle school with a bunch of adults. Those who have worked in private offices for decades have proven to be the most vociferous and rowdy. They haven’t had to consider how their loud habits affect others, so they shout ideas at each other across the table and rehash jokes of yore. As a result, I can only work effectively during times when no one else is around, or if I isolate myself in one of the small, constantly sought-after, glass-windowed meeting rooms around the perimeter.
That’s what I ended up doing at Dell, except they had a lot of little glass “flex spaces.” I just claimed one each day for a year and half. It was great!
"Hybrid cloud ROI isn’t there, and the complexity is huge."
From Steven Sinofsky:
As an enterprise, the pragmatic thing to do is go public cloud and operate existing infrastructure as legacy, without trying to sprinkle cloud on it or spend energy trying to deeply integrate with a cloud solution. The transition to client-server, GUI or Web all provide ample evidence in failed bridge solutions, a long tail of “wish we hadn’t done that” and few successes worth the effort. As a startup, it will be tempting to work to land customers who will pay you to be a bridge, but that will only serve to keep you behind your competitors who are skipping a hybrid solution.