There are many reasons why enterprises are not rushing headlong at adopting the Cloud. For many there is a genuine uncertainty about being an early adopter of the unknown, while others plan to bring Cloud architectures into the business, but only at a controlled pace.
There is also the accepted wisdom that few large enterprises will be an all-Cloud environment, certainly for the foreseeable future. It is for these companies that Computacenter has just launched Computacenter Cloud Computing (C3). The aim of C3 is to offer enterprises the ability to adopt the Cloud at their own pace, mixing onsite and offsite IT delivery models as best suits their experience and needs – both business and emotional.
The debut product of a growing suite of services is C3Mail. This is an email management service built on Microsoft Exchange 2010, a system Computacenter already has extensive experience of as a builder of bespoke enterprise infrastructures. The difference here, according to the company’s Propositions and Strategy Director, Andrew Vize, is that while the system can be run on-premise, the assets are owned, configured and managed by Computacenter.
“This is an off/on premise service. It is similar in some ways to old-style outsourcing, but in the end most enterprise CIOs are less interested in technology than they are the cost of use and getting a reliable, effective result.”
In practice it is aimed at giving organisations a choice of dedicated or shared infrastructure, based within their own datacentre or offsite at Computacenter’s UK-based facilities. Computacenter’s contacts with customers suggest that business priorities continue to focus on reducing costs, managing change and improving productivity. Though the Cloud arguments are getting through there is still reticence over adoption. This caution seems mainly driven by concerns about using remote IT assets that cannot be managed within enterprise governance frameworks.
C3Mail will be followed, before this quarter is out, by a version that provides a collaboration environment by combining Exchange with Sharepoint. By June a C3 Client system based on VMware’s VDI is expected, while C3 Infrastructure should appear before the year is out.
These are expected to follow the model set by C3Mail, where Computacenter takes on the complete management of the service, including full control and ownership of the infrastructure, security, migration, and user administration. Or as Vize positions it:
“This means enterprise users can gain experience of working within the Cloud without having to commit everything to a Cloud architecture while obtaining higher service levels and lower operating costs.”
The timing of the launch is aimed, at least in part, to coincide with the lifecycle of Microsoft’s Exchange family, admits Rob Davies, Computacenter’s Director of Datacentre Contractual Services.
"Many enterprises are still on Exchange 2003. This is now at the end of the lifecycle and users are now planning their next move. Many, of course, will want to go to Exchange 2010. Moving to C3Mail can instantly save the new capital expenditure this will involve, and we estimate it can typically save between 20% and 25% of the overall costs. ”
The concerns over Cloud adoption are echoed in a survey of more than 150 IT decision makers in UK enterprises, by research company Loudhouse. The key findings show that despite understanding the Cloud cost arguments, there are still concerns.
All bar 1% of IT decision makers surveyed highlighted concerns around the risk, service levels or functionality of the Cloud, despite 75% feeling confident that it can help streamline costs. Just a few less, 91% of the total, believe that Cloud can support their organisation by easing headaches around infrastructure upgrades, management and delivering more for less.
This `yes……but’ dichotomy is at the heart of the relationship between enterprises and the Cloud. So Computacenter is pitching at presenting enterprises with a pragmatic, considered approach to the Cloud, where risks are mitigated and organisations can maintain and control access to their data.
The survey also identified another reason to make C3Mail the launch vehicle, as 55% of companies agreed that Cloud email most likely to produce strong benefits with 70% anticipating that their organisation will be using email in a private Cloud within the next three years.
Vize acknowledges that this implies Computacenter – and other Cloud service providers – still have a significant education job to undertake within the enterprise marketplace.
“This is true and we will be helping to educate our customers about the Cloud. We have already invested heavily in our Shared Service Factory, which has a strong service management culture based on service management scorecards that capture information on service processes. This information can then be used to help users understand how Cloud-based services can be managed and exploited. We see customers sourcing services in a mixed source operational model for a long time, so C3 is our response to that business reality.”
