To SaaS or Not to SaaS: 2015 Enterprise App Outlook
Hewlett-Packard today expanded the range of its managed cloud services with the addition of four virtual server and three physical server configurations that are being delivered as part of the HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Jim Fanella, vice president and general manager for HP enterprise services, says that as part of an effort to give IT organizations more cloud computing options, the new virtual servers are aimed at lighter application workloads, while the physical servers will be aimed at mission-critical applications required for dedicated infrastructure.
Naturally, Fanella says that IT organizations can customize those configurations, which are designed to give IT organizations a simpler starting point for moving into the cloud. In reality, Fanella says most IT organizations are moving toward a hybrid computing model. Those hybrid cloud computing implementations will not only span on-premise and cloud computing environments, but also multiple cloud computing services. As such, HP will offer a variety of managed services that span both the HP Helion cloud and systems running on premise, says Fanella.
Based on OpenStack, Fanella says one of the things that is attracting IT organizations to the HP Helion cloud is that it provides them with a hardened implementation of an open source cloud management framework that is ready for use in the enterprise. As interest in building private clouds using OpenStack picks up, HP is betting that many of those private clouds will be deployed on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms.
More often than not, Fanella says IT organizations will be the brokers of private cloud services rather than the actual builders of them. Business leaders are looking for more agility from IT, which most IT organizations are not going to be able to deliver by building every private cloud implementation from the ground up.
Longer term, Fanella says HP is building “cloud maps” through which IT organizations can create templates that are essentially stateless implementations of a private cloud, which can be deployed anywhere in a matter of hours versus requiring them to build the same private cloud multiple times over. Once those maps are created, Fanella adds that IT organizations should be able to expose self-service provisioning capabilities to developers inside their organization within a set of policies and “guardrails” defined by the internal IT organization.
From a cultural perspective, most IT organizations are still getting comfortable with the cloud. But as 2015 continues to evolve, it’s apparent that enterprise IT is rapidly making a shift to a “cloud first” mentality. The only real question is to what degree those clouds are going to be managed by internal IT versus cloud service providers such as HP.
