One of the most fascinating developments in our industry is the morphing of technology providers into service providers over the past decade. Whether it’s an IT VP at McKesson (he did a great podcast last year that you can hear here) describing how he uses the cloud to essentially get out of the systems business so he can be closer to his companies business operations and their needs, or the emergence of brilliantly innovative companies like Smartronix, who’s Cloud Assured product offering turns public cloud assets into secure, purpose built solutions or the new PaaS offerings from VMWare - they all have one thing in common. They seek to provide more useful capabilities to both end users and technologists that involve less systems engineering for the developers, users and managers of technology solutions.
Andy Smith of McKesson describes the shift in mindset required in IT to evolve as a technologist in such a setting. Essentially he says that if an IT pro’s value add to an organization is knowing the vagaries of various OS patch releases or how a particular router gets configured, or some greater version of that across many complex systems, they may not be that valuable to an organization like McKesson in the future. While there will always be a need for great ‘systems’ people in an organization like their’s, the amount of effort that his pre-cloud organization spent on infrastructure was tremendous. Now, leveraging the cloud, he’s steadily re-purposing staff formerly focused on systems towards business analyst type roles (without headcount reductions).
Better said, what a company like McKesson is really doing is outsourcing their systems engineering, or even more precisely, they are accessing pre-engineered systems environments wholesale. Companies like VMWare and Smartronix and many others are trying to deliver that layer of pre-engineered capabilities in various packages, but what they all have in common is that they are now building systems by re-using both public cloud assets and private cloud assets – whether on premise or not. The new systems development frontier is about how to build cloud based solutions that meet business needs wrt security, scalability and functionality in the cloud ecosystem.
At Cordys, our founders saw this future state of computing emerging more than a decade ago, and built a platform that supports this new cloud architecture. As a native web services environment, Cordys efficiently connects to APIs and eases the creation of composite services, weaving them together into a seamless solution fabric. Multi-tenancy mgmt, great mobility support, XaaS provisioning, corporate app stores, composite applications development, BPM model based development – all are in place to support the moment we’ve arrived at. Cordys service provider customers like Savvis and Mercer (see more Cordys customers here) run high volumes of complex processes, all deployed in a highly available service grid that scales horizontally, offering virtually linear performance scalability on commodity hardware, with flexible run time options versus the inefficient and clumsy run-time environment of 1990′s style web apps.
The question we at Cordys are asking you is this: Do you think propagating the same architecture and tools into the cloud from the past is really going to create the paradigm shift you are looking to achieve in terms of agility and productivity? Put another way, will doing Spring based development in the cloud truly give you a huge increase in IT productivity? Or does the advent of the cloud perhaps give your organization a chance to use the best ideas in architecture and technology that are on offer to build an architecture and platform for the future? To access better platforms wholesale?
Service providers – whether that refers to the orientation of the CIO of a large, complex business or an actual provider of cloud services – are all, to some degree, ‘brokering’ various capabilities and blending them into solutions, platforms, services etc. What is required to manage and operate these systems is emerging as ‘cloud services brokerage’ – whether it’s infrastructure federation or say what the likes of Cloud Sherpas do for their clients, managing and adding value to SaaS apps and cloud desktop offerings. It’s a bit of an awkward way to look at it IMHO, and I expect the terms will change, but at the core, it’s about creating solutions and delivering security, lifecycle management, monitoring and good quality-of-service – which is what makes us ‘all Cloud Brokers now’. Here’s more info on Cordys solutions for Service Providers and Cloud Brokers.
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