Archive for September, 2009

Perot Systems bought last week by Dell and then ACS go this week to Xerox so the question is who will be next?

Other big names that may possibly go include;

• ATOS
• CSC
• Fujitsu
• Cap Gemini
• Computacenter
• Logica
• Steria

It is amazing how much consolidation is occuring and how quickly in the industry today and its quite alarming what the big powerhouses are prepared to do to jump onto the IT services bandwagon, Especially when you hear about Outsourcing pricing being whittled down to bare minimal profit margin with customers demanding much more out of there contracts.

Now if you were Xerox or Dell why would you buy an IT services integrator and provider? Many thoughts come to mind such as;

• Entry into the IaaS space
• Build a portfolio of offerings which will be ready for the economic upturn
• Improve indirect sale, they will claim to remain agnostic but the longer term goal is to adopt customers to there platforms/solutions
• Quash competition, namely IBM, Oracle and now HP after EDS

Future Predictions

Oracle buy FJS or even possibly CSC, and why do I think this? They both have credible history and large customers within the Government and Public sector, provide further international coverage with multiple continental reach (especially FJS) and lastly a possible for consideration for purchasing Fujitsu is it builds the current SPARC chips and Oracle has commited to staying in the Hardware business so I expect will want control on the production line.

Another is Cisco are a possible to buy Accenture, they work together on current engagements apparently (how cute) and I see them probably being closely matched in regards to target audience. Accenture is very expensive and has a large price tag but Cisco is one of the few orgs who are capable of buying them HP/EDS stylie. Cisco might even go for an Indian Outfit like TCS or HCL, they are into emerging markets and they probably have large outsourced operations over there already so maybe a good cheaper mix?

Whatever the next acquisition is it will raise an eyebrow, with emerging countries making the world a smaller place and price of companies being at a lower value due to the economy it is bound to happen.

Enter the dragon

• How does your business pay for Infrastructure services today? – Is it on Capex, is it Recharged to business units on an Opex basis, is it on lease, do projects pay for individual requirements on an ad hoc basis,
• Do you chargeback on services based on usage and consumption? Probably answered in question One but if you currently chargeback this is a good thing, IT units see cost as an Opex which is one of the clouds benefits.
• If you do chargeback for VM’s how do you do it? – Do you use a tool or do you have a rule of thumb per Virtual Machine that you use internally?
• Do you use Orchestrational capability - Do you deploy VM’s through a web portal which is aligned to a Service Catalogue?

Whether you do any of the above is most likely for the majority to be a no, a lot of companies have only just started to adopt the strategy for how Infrastructure is billed and how it gets paid for using Chargeback and Opex based financing in your business. If you have implemented such processes aligning and moving to a Cloud strategy will be far much easier. The below diagram is a conceptual on benefits which can be achieved by combining Orchestration and Chargeback models within current virtualised infrastructure, Like I said on my questions above if you have this today you are at the extremely mature end of adoption for your current Infrastructure and will most certainly find moving into a Public or building your own Private cloud easier than most.

If you don’t have the above process and underlying technology to support such a process flow for service requirements from your business, define your requirements from the business and then look to relevant tools and solutions which can enable them within your Infrastructure.

Once you have the “engine” and the IaaS platform that can be exploited to support a complete cloud it is then important to look at how your costs are defined for the provisioned services that your customers require and want. It is important to know that even within the Cloud world cost is based on Opex and not up front Capex for services. With the cloud the end goal is that you only pay for what workload you want, you can shrink and grow application landscapes and financial to avoid the upfront capital expenditure to procure more physical Infrastructure to support any growth and burst.

The key for moving into the start of Cloud is to ensure you have processes in place, my diagram is a conceptual vision and is by all means not going to be completely relevant to your organisation, and with that you need to engage with who is responsible in your business for budgeting and finance and ensure you align this to cloud based strategy.

Summary

After attending VMworld last week I was pleasantly surprised to see some of my previous blog posts almost being based what VMware are using as future strategy, things such as the use of vCloud and IO DRS were two in particular, and no I have not had an NDA for many months.