Selecting the architect and builder

When selecting the right partners to design and build your new home you might consider many factors, but the primary ones will be their level of experience: how long they have been in the business and how many homes have they built? Have they built similar homes in the past? Are these homes well-built with a superior design, high quality, and craftsmanship that stands the test of time? Are they living in one of the homes they designed and built?  Does their own home showcase their work?   When a customer asks these questions about AT&T they would learn that we have 15 years of experience in hosting and 38 global data center facilities. And, yes, we live in the house we built: we use the same resources and processes to support AT&T’s enterprise IT needs as we do for our customers. Additionally, we always have our eye, via our Foundry and Labs, on exploring and producing the next innovation. Certainly one could select a provider without many of these characteristics, but as we believe the Gartner report suggests, our track record in managed hosting is a key strength for our customers.

Laying the foundation

After selecting a builder, it’s time to break ground.  After all, the foundation is the basis upon which everything else will be built.  At AT&T, our network is the foundation for our managed hosting and cloud services; it’s at the core of everything we do. What good is putting data and applications in remote locations if you can’t access them securely and reliably?

Making it your home

Once your foundation is solid you can move to the most exciting part: making your home your own with unique finishing touches. With managed hosting, this means selecting from a variety of options to meet the needs of your business, whether it is the use of our data center facilities, provider-managed computing, or network bandwidth and storage capacity.  And if you require a renovation because your needs have changed, by working with the same construction partner and architect, you can easily add an extension to your home. It’s the same with our cloud solutions – we rarely see customers come to us purely for cloud or managed hosting. Working with us to fit these services into the broader business IT mix is where our customers gain the most value.

We have spent years developing managed hosting and cloud solutions that lighten the heavy load for any IT organization, and it is our vast solutions offering that allows us to customize service for even the most complex enterprise needs.

I believe historical success, the network, and the overall portfolio of solutions should all be factors when businesses look for the right partner. What are the key elements you look for in a managed hosting solution?

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose

For many industry soothsayers, 2012 was going to be the year cloud went mainstream.  Are we there yet?  With IDC reporting that global spending on public IT cloud services will be more than $40 billion this year with a compound annual growth rate of more than 25%, it looks like 2013 will be the year that cloud pays off for many vendors and customers.

Here’s how I see these trends playing out in 2013 and beyond:

1. Increased adoption of applications as a service impacts capital expense

While not a zero sum game, we are already seeing the inroads cloud is making against capital expense allocated to traditional IT infrastructure.  Businesses are seriously considering buying services on-demand rather than purchasing physical hardware (e.g. servers, racks, network switches, PCs), software licenses and maintenance contracts. Conversely, cloud service providers are becoming much larger customers of hardware and software vendors.

2. The rise of specialist cloud consultants

As the money shifts to cloud we are witnessing an entire new industry of cloud consultants and specialists springing up to help businesses build and use cloud architecture. Joining the ranks of smaller independent niche consultants and hardware vendors with professional service arms, the traditional big consulting firms are all working to assemble the talent and skill sets needed to beef up their newly formed cloud consulting practices.  At the same time, there are increasing opportunities for enterprise IT departments to become internal cloud specialists and play a more strategic role in helping provide their businesses greater agility in leveraging cloud capabilities.

3. Evolution of mobile cloud

The bring your own device trend and the continuing  decline of the PC as the dominant computing platform will accelerate the move towards mobile cloud as more businesses become increasingly mobile and shift IT assets from their own data centers to the cloud. In this environment, security becomes more important than ever. As a result, enterprise IT will be entrusted with setting clear policies that provide security for accessing cloud applications on mobile devices without squashing the innovation enabled by cloud.

4. Cloud clarity will start to emerge in 2013

Today, a great deal of confusion still exists over the conflicting approaches to deploying cloud by various vendors and service providers, and it’s not clear where businesses should turn.  This fragmentation should begin to dissipate later in 2013 and beyond as the marketplace coalesces around standards and clear winners emerge. Open source will continue to gain relevance, and we’ll see more commercialized services based on open source platforms coming to market.

5. Cloud standards slowly emerge

For cloud to truly go mainstream it needs to evolve from a vendor-by-vendor solution, as it is today, to a utility platform differentiated by reliability, scalability and standardization.  Marketplace standards are driven by vendors, standards groups and market forces. APIs will have to be standardized, and interoperability and federated cloud formations will need to happen – both in a geographic sense and within industry verticals.

Clearly, an enterprise cloud requires superior engineering, and is automated, highly scalable, and resilient — both physically and logically. The enterprise cloud is designed with robust features enabling an enterprise to tailor and tune its applications to optimize performance.

However, in my view, as critical as that is, these characteristics represent only half the equation of the enterprise cloud. Fundamentally that’s because enterprises generally don’t want to have to employ world-class engineers to run a cloud.  They want a cloud that is easy to use, doesn’t require a Ph.D. in engineering to interface with its APIs, and yet is dependable enough to rely upon for their business success. They very much want or need proactive service management and world class operations.

While in its purest form a cloud is by definition “self service,” many enterprises prefer to focus on their business applications and not the operations of their cloud.  However, making those applications perform as needed very much relies upon a service provider to flawlessly operate the cloud platform using a service model that is linked to that of the enterprise.

In my experience, that cloud service model can be the critical success factor in an enterprise cloud strategy.  A successful cloud service model requires a service partner that:

1. …understands your business and your applications, and collaborates effectively with your team to tune performance, integrate with legacy systems, and deploy new capabilities.

2.  …proactively manages the key metrics that matter to your success (e.g., customer response time, abandoned shopping carts).

3.  …offers suggestions on how your customer experience can be improved and takes initiative to implement solutions.

4. …is as much a part of your business success or failure as anyone that works for your company, and is measured and rewarded accordingly.

5.  …is truly an extension of your business.

As you assess your own success and improvement opportunities through the key sales period of the holiday season, I encourage you to consider service excellence on your critical success list for your enterprise cloud.  I think you’ll find it’s an area that far too many providers have ignored or can’t address.

Please share your own experiences and let me know if you agree.  Thanks, happy holidays, and good shopping!

AT&T has long been vocal about “Virtual Private Clouds”, and in fact has engineered our own cloud services to run in an integrated fashion with our VPN services.  Now we are extending that unique capability by introducing a network enabled cloud with IBM that will allow customers to use IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise+ capabilities as part of the AT&T VPN network.  This is significant in that it’s a lot more than connecting a network to a computing cloud.  It’s a jointly engineered offering that opens up the AT&T network to the IBM cloud, creating a service that dynamically orchestrates cloud resources across the network, with all the security, reliability and performance controls that customers depend upon in their VPN.

But what exactly does this mean for enterprises?

• Security: the cloud apps run as part of the MPLS VPN, not exposing data to the public Internet, nor potential attacks
• Performance: application performance is not impacted by volatility of the Internet, and class of service can be tuned by application workload
• Reliability: combines the service capabilities of two proven industry leaders, and turns cloud into a managed solution, end to end
• Scalability: the network dynamically flexes in conjunction with the cloud resources, providing a truly scalable on-demand solution

Many enterprises have been considering their cloud strategies, and most have in some way adopted private clouds, while possibly testing public clouds for less critical workloads.  By moving beyond the commodity cloud model and addressing the adoption challenges that have plagued the early days of cloud, AT&T and IBM have made it possible for enterprise customers to seriously consider cloud solutions for their mission critical applications.  And of course the AT&T VPN network, trusted by so many customers to run their businesses, is the foundational platform for the network enabled cloud.

How is your business approaching cloud for your mission critical applications? Could you benefit from better scalability? What is your current strategy in terms of security and application performance?

Your internal customers and business unit heads have heard about it, and in probably more cases than you want to think about, they are already using it.  We may call them rogue users or “shadow IT,” but they are out there, and every day there are more and more of them, placing different applications and workloads in some service provider’s cloud.

Why is this happening?  The common answers are cost savings and shifting from capex to opex economics.  While that’s true, I’d argue the most significant reason is the business velocity cloud enables.  The ability to rapidly test and launch new business concepts often more quickly than we could consider the IT requirements traditionally — never mind turn up even a prototype application — is the primary driver.  So it’s economically compelling, it empowers the business user to run the business without the need for cumbersome IT processes, and it seems your competitors are doing it. These are three good reasons why it’s imperative for your business to be able to operate in “cloud time” as well.

CIO – The Cloud Time Thought Leader

So what’s a CIO to do about this cloud phenomenon?  It’s time to embrace it and lead the charge.  The CIO is well positioned to lead this cloud transformation, and to be relevant in the organization’s move to cloud.  Some areas where you can be a thought leader and change agent include:

• Defining requirements for Cloud Service Providers – What services does the business need? What are the technical requirements? Business compliance considerations? Desired user experience?  What is your current cost structure as a baseline?  What are your current cycle times?
• Conducting a workload analysis – What workloads or application types in your business are best suited to cloud, and then what types of clouds are best for each of those? IaaS for variable demand apps? PaaS for development? SaaS for common finished apps?  How do you tie these together where needed?
• Mobility support – What is your strategy for mobilization of your business processes to support your end customers or supply chain, and how does the cloud support that as a mobility enabler? What’s your model for mobile security in the cloud?
• Linkage to your legacy – despite the hype, legacy systems and applications are not disappearing anytime soon, so how will some of these new cloud-based applications interface or coexist with the legacy base?  Will you leverage hybrid models, develop APIs, or carve out only new apps without legacy touch points?

Driving the Culture Shift – The CIO at the Wheel

CIOs are well positioned to both embrace the cloud for their business, and also to bring a pragmatic approach to cloud adoption overall. I would dare say it’s the CIO’s responsibility to provide an IT-endorsed cloud strategy.  Many CIOs have taken this progressive approach and are well down the path of cloud adoption. Most are somewhere between studying their cloud options, developing a cloud strategy, and building a private cloud.

No matter where you and your organization may fall on this spectrum, successful leaders are driving a full-blown culture shift within their IT teams, and in much of the larger business.  Some suggestions for making that journey with your business include the following:

• Squash the ostriches:  Help your teams to understand what’s happening and embrace it.  The former world of traditional IT will not return, and that’s ok.  The new world is exciting and presents plenty of opportunities to the technically and business savvy.
• Develop your strategy:  Consider selecting a key partner or two for each major category of cloud service that’s critical to your business needs.  You can demonstrate how progressive your effort is to your internal customers when you endorse cloud providers for different use cases or workloads, all of which address your critical security requirements, performance criteria, and compliance.
• Build new skills:  While there is no shortage of technical skills required for cloud success, partnering and sourcing skills are something key to success in the cloud world.  Tomorrow’s future IT leaders will work across company lines and manage relationships — likely with several cloud suppliers — marrying their services with your own organic capabilities all to serve your joint customers.  IT professionals successful in that type of collaboration will be in great demand and will thrive.

Most importantly, take a leadership role in the transformation. Cloud is here, it’s real, it’s growing, and your business is using it.  Driving the firm to a model for success in a cloud world — where the pursuit of economic benefit, business agility, dynamic scaling, and enterprise grade performance is a challenge – is something every business will face.  Tomorrow’s leaders will be those who embrace that challenge and lead their firms to success in the cloud.

What are your thoughts and tips for CIOs leading the charge into cloud time? How can IT professionals be change agents of the business? Contact me at @caniano.

The importance of an enterprise-grade network at the center of cloud services cannot be overstated. Without it, private clouds are closed systems, and public clouds are subject to unpredictable performance and potential security breaches. The optimum cloud is one that is network-based, where cloud services are actually embedded in the network. A network-based, or “virtual private cloud”, allows cloud workloads and applications to be managed and delivered as part of a total solution to any device, just like voice and data.

In my session, I will discuss how this approach can offer businesses the scale and flexibility of the cloud  without sacrificing performance, reliability, or security.

What role do you think the network plays in the cloud? And if you’ll be at the conference, be sure to say hello. You can find me at @caniano on Twitter. You can also follow the conversation via the hashtag #cloudexpo.

Sometimes, keeping up with technology feels like juggling on a unicycle. The landscape is changing constantly, and whole new categories are popping out of the woodwork. Who could have predicted the success of the iPad? Do you know that Apple has already sold 55 million of them? It took 22 years to sell 55 million Macs, and they’ve sold that many iPads in less than two.

Many in IT are now focused on mobility solutions. Certainly, the implications of a mobile workforce are huge, in terms of lifestyle, productivity, security and human resources. Most people seem to love it, some are afraid of it, but love it or hate it’s here to stay.

Put cool applications, and fast networks together with mobile technology and you’ve got the consumerization of IT. People like their sexy new smart phones, and they expect your business apps to be just as engaging. Why wouldn’t they? They want slick, intuitive interfaces, and they want to bring their own devices to work. Who wants to carry two cell phones or even lug around a laptop anymore? Just give me my smartphone and a tablet and I’m good to go!

But there’s something else, which isn’t getting as much attention as it deserves. That’s the arrival of Big Data as a business driver. Big data refers to data sets that are so large they can’t be captured, managed, stored or analyzed with traditional database tools. And working with big data is a challenge on every level, from capture to storage and from analysis to visualization. The proliferation of wireless devices (as well as various kinds of Internet-aware gadgetry) is creating a tidal wave of raw data. In a world of Wi-Fi enabled refrigerators, we’re absolutely awash in the stuff. Large volumes of data are generated in many industries including transactional data, clickstream data from the Web, email, tweets, social network posts and data gathered from sensors monitoring the physical world. Data rates are doubling every 18 months, with a 300-fold increase in data volume predicted in this decade. Check out this Infographic, and you’ll get a sense of the big picture.

This data can generate tremendous value for businesses that are able to use it – to improve decision making, discover trends, customize services, and innovate new products and business models. The problem is that most businesses aren’t ready to manage this flood of data, much less do anything interesting with it. The potential is vast, when you think about what could be done with market analysis, trend spotting and research. For example, big data is a top three priority at Walmart. They’re using big data tools to sift through social network posts and anticipate spikes in demand (like the one they saw for juicers after Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead hit the Netflix video streaming service).

Big data will impact every industry, as well as education and government. In fact, the Federal government just announced a new research initiative here, with a budget of $200 million. The Feds think big data is where the future of computing lies.

Food for thought… What do you think is happening with big data now? Where do you think it’s going and how will that change the way you do business?

I’m not only excited about what this represents to us here at AT&T (as we know, the cloud has somewhat of a buzz these days!), but also more importantly, for its implications for enterprise customers.

As I discussed at the Tuck School of Business’ Center for Digital Strategies panel on ‘Innovation On Demand: The Promise of Cloud Computing’ last month, and in the spirit of Spring Training, it is about the ‘third inning’ for cloud in the enterprise.

Businesses are looking to understand the value they can gain from ‘the cloud’ as well as how to navigate the risks. This is where Gartner’s Magic Quadrants can be helpful in providing guidance as they consider the partner best able to meet their needs.

The question is: how do you match a vendor’s strengths in enterprise-class cloud services to the needs of your business? Here are some of my thoughts:

• Ability to deliver enterprise application hosting and management for core ERP systems (SAP, Oracle and SharePoint) in combination with colocation, utility and cloud services – For many businesses, running ERP applications in the cloud can reap many rewards, including cost- and management-efficiencies. However, for these business-critical apps, it can’t come at the cost of security and reliability: the cloud needs to deliver enterprise-class performance or it simply isn’t worth it. That’s why it is important to build cloud services into the network so they are a part of your virtual private cloud, with predictable performance and enterprise grade security. The ultimate system you deploy should enable your business to use cloud solutions to complement dedicated solutions, realizing the promise of hybrid environments without tossing out what works for you today.
• A solid road map around hosted and cloud environments, extending the ‘as-a-service’ vision into mobile platforms, collaboration and unified communications, in order to eventually provide cost-effective, scalable and truly integrated communication services. What business isn’t mobilizing its processes these days to support customers, employees and partners? By embedding cloud capabilities into the managed network, you can manage cloud services and applications as part of a total solution – down to any device that your business is using.
• Effective tailoring of customer support, account management and strategic planning to the size and scope of your business – Cloud doesn’t alleviate the need for service and operational excellence, in fact it heightens it. You want to work with a partner who has a history of delivering enterprise-class solutions and understands your business’ key needs. When it comes to cloud for businesses, one size does not fit all. Agility and flexibility are two of the great promises of the cloud, so the ability to build cloud services that meet an enterprise’s needs are crucial. However the ability to support that cloud solution is mission critical.

You can find out about offerings we have at AT&T to help your business here. Selecting the right partner to work with your business in managed hosting is vital for your business success. By following these guidelines you can be more confident you’re making the right decision.

How does this relate to your business needs? Do you see enterprises considering these issues as they adopt cloud? We a looking forward to hear from you in the comments.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose

¹ Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting, 2012, Ted Chamberlin, Lydia Leong, March 5, 2012.

I firmly believe that cloud solutions can enable creativity in business by simplifying all the ‘nuts and bolts’ required to build, run and maintain new technology solutions. Businesses want their cloud and mobility services combined in security enhanced, scalable solutions that help them save costs and transform the way they work.

That’s why we have embedded cloud capabilities directly into the AT&T managed network so that we can manage and deliver cloud services and applications as part of a total solution – down to virtually any  device. Cloud is the platform that helps truly creative people develop new apps and solutions without having to worry about servers, data centers, interoperability and the like.

In the same way we think the network is becoming like ‘oxygen’ for developers, consumers and businesses, we envision the network-based cloud to be the lifeblood that helps ideas become reality.

Do you see cloud as an innovation enabler in your business? And how do you see cloud changing the way you approach innovation and creativity? Let me know in the comments, and keep an eye out on the AT&T Business Solutions Twitter feed or search #Cloud for live updates during the panel conversation.

UPDATE: While at the Tuck School of Business last week, I spoke with one of the Center for Digital Strategies’ MBA Fellows, Vivek Narasimhan, about the potential of cloud computing. Check out the video interview here:

Steve developed AT&T’s network enabled cloud strategy and led the transformation of our hosting business into scalable, on demand solutions. He has been instrumental in forging key partner alliances to support the business, while scaling services globally. Steve regularly collaborates with customers to ensure AT&T is meeting customer expectations and requirements, but more importantly incorporating customer insights into AT&T’s  cloud solutions strategy and portfolio. He frequently represents AT&T in key industry events and analyst forums to position cloud solutions and to shape marketplace perceptions of AT&T’s role in the “cloud”.

During his career at AT&T, Steve has held positions in sales, operations, program management, product management, strategic planning, supplier management and systems development. Steve designed and launched the original Global Solution Center in support of business customers, and led the team having responsibility for engagement management, solution strategy and technical solution design for our largest enterprise and global customers.  He has worked with and managed leading edge technologies throughout his career, while always maintaining focus on the customer solution.

Steve resides in New Jersey and holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science and an MBA in Marketing.