Blog Archives
Research du jour
My newest research notes are all collaborative efforts.
Forecast: Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services. This is Gartner’s official take on cloud segmentation and forecasting through 2013. It was a large-team effort; my contribution was primarily on the compute services portion.
Invest Insight: Content Delivery Network Arbitrage Increases Market Competition. This is a note specifically for Gartner Invest clients, written in conjunction with my colleague Frank Marsala (a former sell-side analyst who heads up our telecom sector for investors). It’s primarily about Conviva but also touches on Cotendo, but its key point is not to look at particular companies, but to look at technology-enabled long-term trends.
Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing Management and Professional Services, 2009. This is part of our annual “cool vendors” series highlighting small vendors whom we think are doing something notable. It’s a group effort, and we pick the vendors via committee. (And no, there is no way to buy your way into the report.) This year’s picks (never a secret, since vendors usually do press releases) are Appirio, CohesiveFT, Hyperic, RightScale, and Ylastic.
TCO tool for cloud computing
Gartner clients might be interested in my just-published piece of research, which is a TCO toolkit for comparing the cost of internal and cloud infrastructure.
A not-new link, but which I nonetheless want to draw people’s attention to as much as possible: Yahoo’s best practices for speeding up your web site is a superb list of clearly-articulated tips for improving your site performance and the user’s perception of performance (which goes beyond just site performance). Recommended reading for everyone from the serious Web developer to the guy just throwing some HTML up for his personal pages.
On the similarly not-new but still-interesting front, Voxel’s open-source mod_cdn module for Apache is a cool little bit of code that makes it easy to CDN-ify your site — install the module and it’ll automatically transform your links to static content. For those of you who are dealing with CDNs that don’t provide CNAME support (like the Rackspace/Limelight combo), are using Apache for your origin front-end, and who don’t want to fool with mod_rewrite, this might be an interesting alternative.
Interesting tidbits for the week
A bit of a link round-up…
My colleague Daryl Plummer has posted his rebuttal in our ongoing debate over cloud infrastructure commoditization. I agree with his assertion that over the long term, the bigger growth stories will be the value-added providers and not the pure-play cloud infrastructure guys, but I also stick to my guns in believing that customer service is a differentiator and we’ll have a lot of pure-plays, not a half-dozen monolithic mega-infrastructure-providers.
Michael Topalovich, of Delivered Innovation, has blogged a post-mortem on Coghead. It’s a well-written and detailed dissection of what went wrong, from the perspective of a former Coghead partner. Anyone who runs or uses a platform as a service would be well served to read it, as there are plenty of excellent lessons to be learned.
Richard Jones, of Last.fm, has put up an annotated short-list of distributed key-value stores (mostly in the form of distributed hash tables). He’s looking for a premise-based rather than cloud-based solution, but his commentary is thoughtful and the comments thread is interesting as well.
Also, I have a new research note out (Gartner clients only), in collaboration with my colleague Ted Chamberlin: evaluation criteria for Web hosting (including cloud infrastructure services in that context), which is the decision framework that supports the the Magic Quadrant that we’re anticipating publishing in April. (Also coming soon, a “how to choose a cloud infrastructure provider” note and accompanying toolkit.)
Credibility
I’ve recently read Pete Blackshaw’s Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, which is a well-written, methodical introduction to consumer-generated media (CGM, also known as UGC, user-generated content). I’d recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read a book on the topic; if you’re social-media savvy, chances are you won’t learn much (if anything) new, but the anecdotes are entertaining and useful, and the structured approach provides good framework language.
Thus, trust, credibility, and authenticity in corporate engagement are very much on my mind, at a time when there’s a new (resurfaced) controversy regarding local-review site Yelp, which is being accused of manipulating user reviews to gain advertising revenues. Naturally, Yelp denies any extortion of local businesses.
As an analyst, I belong to an industry which is constantly being questioned about the credibility and authenticity of its commentary — the age-old question of whether it’s a “pay to play” business where vendor clients receive ratings and recommendations that are more favorable than those that non-clients get. I still find myself having to stress to clients and non-clients alike that Gartner opinion cannot be bought. It’s one of the genuinely great aspects of working here — the organizational commitment to integrity. This is not to say that there aren’t conflicts — a vendor client has more avenues with which to express their unhappiness with an analyst’s opinion, and attempt to influence it in a more positive direction. But in the end, we pride ourselves on serving our IT buyer clients with honest advice — which means that vendor dollars can’t be allowed to influence analyst opinion.
I imagine that for any organization which provides reviews and recommendations as part of its business, and which accepts money from the entities being rated, has problems with rogue salespeople who attempt to imply, or even outright state, that paying for services means more favorable positioning. So the question is, what’s the organization’s attitude, from the CEO down, towards these things? Is it a wink-wink nudge-nudge thing where the organization only pays lip service to neutrality, is it a don’t-ask don’t-tell thing where the organization is willing to turn a blind eye as long as it doesn’t cause obvious problems, or is the organization really dedicated to ensuring that dollars don’t alter anything?
Which of these categories does Yelp fall into? I’m a pretty engaged consumer — I read reviews on Yelp, and I write them from time to time. I’ve got a keen interest in knowing.
We’re hiring a European emerging services analyst!
Gartner is hiring! Here’s the formal job posting: Research Director, Emerging Enterprise Network Services, Europe. (Or you can go to Gartner Careers and search for req 7705BR.)
Informally, here’s the scoop:
My team is looking for a European counterpart for me — someone who will be European-based, European-focused, and cover Internet infrastructure services and other emerging network services. That means following hosting, colocation, content delivery networks, cloud computing, the Internet bandwidth market, and so on. There’s a global element to this position, too, and this analyst will also deal with non-region-specific issues.
The right candidate is probably currently a senior product manager; a senior manager or director in a technical operations, product engineering, or sales engineering organization; or a senior technical evangelist. (Or they’re an analyst at one of our competitors.) They almost certainly have a background working for an ISP, carrier, Web hoster, data center outsourcer, IT consultancy with a specialization in data centers or networks, CDN, or other Internet-centric company.
This is your chance to influence the evolution of an entire industry, at a critical juncture in time. You’ll get to work with smart, self-motivated people across a wide variety of topic areas, advise executives at vendors as well as end-user organizations, and really dive into the things that interest you and our clients.
Feel free to drop me a line if you want to hear more.
What’s hot?
January was a crazy, crazy month, and February looks to be shaping up to be just as intensive, if not more so.
During January, in the fifteen available working days (the days not completely consumed by travel or by our research planning process), I had one hundred interactions — one hundred individual client/prospect inquiries or visits.
This first week of February alone, in four working days, I’m going to have thirty-four interactions. The only reason there aren’t more is that I’m physically out of schedulable hours.
What do all of these people want to talk about? Mostly cloud computing in the form of public cloud infrastructure services (40%), colocation (20%), and CDN services (20%). (Percentages are for this week.)
It’s pretty much all about cost savings, right now.
Seven years to SEAP, not to cloud in general
Gartner recently put out a press release titled “Gartner Says Cloud Application Infrastructure Technologies Need Seven Years to Mature“, based on a report from my colleague Mark Driver. That’s gotten a bunch of pickup in the press and in the blogosphere. I’ve read a lot of people commenting about how the timeline given seems surprisingly conservative, and I suspect it’s part of what has annoyed Reuven Cohen into posting, “Cloud computing is for everyone — except stupid people.”
The confusion, I think, is over what the timeline actually covers. Mark is talking specifically about service-enabled application platforms (SEAPs), not cloud computing in general. Basically, a SEAP is a foundation platform for software as a service. Examples of current-generation SEAP platforms are Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, the Facebook application platform, Coghead, and Bungee Labs. (Gartner clients who want to drill into SEAP, see The Impact of SaaS on Application Servers and Platforms.) When you’re talking about SEAP adoption, you’re talking about something pretty complex, on a very different timeframe than the evolution of the broader cloud computing style.
Cloud computing in general already has substantial business uptake, with potential radical acceleration due to the economic downturn. I say “potential” because it’s very clear to me that existing public cloud services, at their current state of maturity, frequently don’t meet the requirements that enterprises are looking for right now. I have far more clients suddenly willing to consider taking even big risks to leap into the cloud, than I have clients who actually have projects well-suited to the public cloud and who will realize substantial immediate cost savings from that move.
On the flip side, for those who have public-facing Web infrastructure, cloud services are now a no-brainer. Expect cloud elasticity and fast provisioning to simply become part of hosting and data center outsourcing solutions. Traditional hosting providers who don’t make the transition near-immediately are going to get eaten alive.
Recent polling results
I’ve just put out a new research report called The Changing Colocation and Data Center Market. Macroeconomic factors have driven major changes in both the supply and demand picture for data center construction, leasing, and colocation, in the last quarter of 2008, continuing into this year. The economic environment has brought about abrupt shift in sourcing strategies, build plans, and the like, driving a ton of inquiry for myself and my colleagues. This report looks at those changes, and presents results from a colocation poll done of attendees at Gartner’s data center conference in December.
Those of you interested in commentary related to that conference might also want to read reports done by colleagues of mine: Too Many Data Center Conference Attendees Are Not Considering Availability and Location Risks in Data Center Siting and Sourcing Decisions, and an issue near and dear to many businesses right now, how to stretch out their money and current data center life, Pragmatic Guidance on Data Center Energy Issues for the Next 18 Months.
Reports are clients-only, sorry.
My coverage
I’ve received various queries from people, particularly analyst relations folks at vendors, trying to understand what I cover, especially as it relates to cloud computing, so I figured I’d devote a blog post to explaining.
Gartner analysts do not really have “official coverage areas” defined by titles, and our coverage shifts dynamically based on client needs and our own interests. We are matrix-managed, and our research falls into “agendas” (which may be outside our “home team”) and we collaborate across the company in “research communities”. I report into a team called Enterprise Network Services within our Technology and Service Providers group (i.e., what was Dataquest), but I spend about 90% of my time answering end-user inquiries, with the remainder split between vendors and investors. I focus on North America but also track my markets globally. I’m responding for sizing and forecasting my markets, too.
I use the term “Internet infrastructure services” to succinctly describe my coverage, but other terms, like “emerging enterprise network services” are used, as well. I cover services that are enabled by networks, rather than networking per se.
My coverage falls into the following broad buckets:
- Hosting, colocation, and the general market for data center space.
- Content delivery networks, and application delivery networks as a service.
- The Internet ecosystem, enabling technologies like DNS, policy issues, etc.
- Cloud computing.
Cloud computing, of course, is an enormously broad topic, and it’s covered across Gartner in many areas of specialization, with those of us who track it closely collaborating via our Cloud research community.
My particular focus in the cloud realm is on cloud infrastructure services — public clouds and “virtual private” clouds, on the infrastructure side (i.e., excluding SaaS, consumer content/apps, etc.). Because so many of these services are, in their currently-nascent stage, basically a way to host applications built using Web technologies, and compete directly in that same market, it’s been a very natural extension of my coverage of hosting. But by the nature of the topic, my coverage also crosses into everything else touching the space.
Our end-user customers (IT managers and architects) ask me questions like:
- Help me cut through the hype and figure out this cloud thing.
- Help me to understand what cloud offerings are available today.
- Given my requirements, is there a cloud service that’s right for me?
- What short-list of vendors should I look at for cloud infrastructure?
- What’s the cost of the various cloud options?
- What should I think about when considering putting a project in the cloud?
- What will I need to do in order to get my application to run in the cloud?
- What best practices can I learn from cloud vendors?
Our vendor customers ask me questions like:
- How is the cloud transformation going to affect my business?
- What do users care about when purchasing a cloud service?
- What does the competitive landscape look like?
- What should I be thinking about in my three-year roadmap?
- What are the technologies that I should be exploiting?
- Who should I acquire for competitive advantage?
My research is primarily grounded in the here-and-now — from what’s available now, to what’s going to be important over the next five years. However, like everyone who covers cloud computing, I’m also hunched over the crystal ball, trying to see a decade or two into the future. But companies buy stuff thinking about their needs right now and maybe their needs three years out, and vendors think about the next year’s product plans and how it positions them three years out, so I’m kept pretty busy dealing within the more immediate-term window of “how do I cut through the hype to use cloud to bring measurable benefit to my business?”
The value, or not, of hands-on testing
At Gartner, we generally do not do hands-on testing of products, with the exception of some folks who cover consumer devices and the like. And even then, it’s an informal thing. Unlike the trade rags, for instance, we don’t have test labs or other facilities for doing formal testing.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but from my perspective, the analyst role has been primarily to advise IT management. Engineers can and will want to do testing themselves (and better than we can). Also, for the mid-size to enterprise market that we target, any hands-on testing that we might do is relatively meaningless vis a vis the complexity of the typical enterprise implementation.
Yet, the self-service nature of cloud computing makes it trivially cheap to do testing of these services, and without needing to involve the vendor. (I find that if I’m paying for a service, I feel free to bother the customer support guys, and find out what that’s really like, without being a nuisance to analyst relations or getting a false impression.) So for me, testing things myself has a kind of magnetic draw; call it the siren song of my inner geek. The question I’m asking myself, given the time consumed, is, “To what end?”
I think the reason I’m trying to do at least a little bit of hands-on with each major cloud is that I feel like I’m grounding hype in reality. I know that in superficially dinking around with these clouds, I’m only lightly skimming the surface of what it’s like to deploy in the environments. But it gives me an idea of how turnkey something is, or not, as well as the level of polish in these initial efforts.
This is a market that is full of incredible hype, and going through the mental exercise of “how would I use this in production” helps me to advise my clients on what is and isn’t ready for prime-time. An acquaintance once memorably wrote, when he was disputing some research, that analysts sit at the apex of the hype food-chain, consuming pure hype and excreting little pellets of hype as dense as neutronium. I remember being both amused and deeply offended when I first read that. Of course, I think he was very wrong — whatever we’re fed in marketing, tends to be more than overcome by the overwhelming volume of IT buyer inquiry we do, which is full of the ugly reality of actual implementation. But the comment has stuck in my memory as a dark reminder that an analyst needs to be vigilant about not feeding at the hype-trough. Keeping in touch by being at least a little hands-on helps to innoculate against that.
However, I realized, after talking to a cloud vendor client the other day, that I probably should not waste their phone inquiry time talking about hands-on impressions. That’s better left to this blog, or email, or their customers and the geek blogosphere. My direct impressions are only meaningfully relevant to the extent that what I experience hands-on contradicts marketing messages, or indicates a misalignment between strategy and implementation, or otherwise touches something higher-level. My job, as an analyst, is to not get lost in the weeds.
Nevertheless, there’s simply nothing like gaining a direct feel for something, and I am, unfortunately, way behind in my testing; I’ve got more demos accumulating than I’ve had time to try out, and the longer it takes to set something up, the more it lags in my mental queue.
CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing 