On premise IT: not in good shape
The Longhaus research data is clear, after 30 odd years of building our on-premise IT, generally speaking when it comes to IT Service Management (ITSM) and service assurance, on-premise ICT still has a relatively poor report card. Just one example, in the 2009 Longhaus annual study we could only find 17% of CIOs with a complete service catalogue and less than half of all the CIOs had managed to establish and mature a single service desk or service centre. Problematic is that many of the remaining CIOs were not intending to adopt these capabilities.
By 2011 little had changed, but to add a new complexity, our 2011 studies found that nearly 80% of the CIOs surveyed indicated that they were now pursuing or planning on pursuing private or hybrid cloud. In my view some of these CIOs are going to be challenged to implement an effective private or hybrid cloud if they are not building upon a core DNA of robust and repeatable ITSM. Within the adoption survey we included what I would call the 12 pillars of ITSM, everything from availability, redundancy, automated provisioning, asset management, multi-tenancy, chargeback, service catalogue, monitoring just to name a few. The data is compelling, in every case less than half had adopted these capabilities or were planning to adopt. In some cases the adoption was as low as 20% or less.
In my view, if the data still shows that the general level of adoption and maturity with service management and service assurance remains low, then many of these private clouds are not going to be built on a good foundation and therefore many are not likely to be good clouds.
If this is the case then for many moving to a private cloud it looks very much like repeating the same mistakes of the past 30 years, however this time in a new location.
Moving the mess to the cloud means one thing: you have a mess in the cloud!
On the other side of the fence, the cloud vendors and cloud service providers have all the service management and service assurance nailed … right?
The 2011 Longhaus study of Australia’s Trusted Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud Providers reveals that the report card in this regard is not much better. The data from this study reveals that a lot of the cloud service providers have been focussing on technical delivery and getting their product to market with a low adoption rate of service management and service assurance. When I look at this as an industry analyst and ask these service providers about this they say “we are waiting for our major vendor to add that feature or release that module and then we can focus more on service management and service assurance”. When I look at this data the warning bells start ringing and I suggest that CIOs need to carefully consider the current state of ITSM adoption with any cloud service provider being considered. It is unlikely that service providers will let customers see what is really under the covers, unless you are an industry analyst there is very little transperancy in the market, but assuming that you could do rigorous due diligence of your provider what do you think you would find?
The race for market share or differentiation?
The analyst community has put out a lot of information on just how big the cloud market is going to be. It seemed to be the number one question that vendors were asking of the researchers: “How much money can we make here?”. And as a result of this analysis there were some pretty big numbers bandied around causing some vendors to salivate. With the prospective revenues published, the vendors business cases were quickly approved and the race was on to get the cloud product ready for market and the cloud brochures printed.
For many the answer to the question on service management and assurance was “we’ll get to that later”. This is quite concerning especially given that much of the cloud computing marketing message is that they can do things much better, much quicker and more securely than on-premise IT can do it.
Once the cloud hype truly dissipates, the competitive differentiation will not come from having a cloud offering, everyone will be in that space. The differentiation will come from having transparency and visibility around the best capabilities with service management and service assurance.
[...] compliance, continuity, service management and service assurance. As I blogged here previously the research data on the cloud market indicates that there is some further improvement and maturity …. Interesting to see that the marketing machines of some cloud vendors are now repeatedly using the [...]