Moving Beyond a Single Cloud

In today’s IT landscape, many companies don’t have only a single cloud. Many use a mix of on-premise, hybrid, and public cloud offerings, presenting a unique opportunity for partners to integrate these disparate environments.

Businesses need applications to work seamlessly across all instances and workloads that can easily move from one cloud to another. Partners may be able to capitalise on the move to hybrid deployments by offering a solution that works across multiple platforms and with the vast array of apps that businesses run. Enterprise open source solutions can help fulfil this multi-platform requirement.

Max McLaren, regional vice president and general manager at Red Hat, told a recent ARN roundtable that the company has seen a lot of transformation. By partnering with vendors like Microsoft, Red Hat is aiming to give the channel tools to provide customers with hybrid cloud services they are asking for.

McLaren said, “The major change is moving away from traditional license-based procurement model, which was a perpetual model over time, towards a subscription-based model, which we’ve been championing for many years.

“Customers want as-a-service, and I believe that Australia is out in front relative to the rest of the world in the as-a-service requirement.

“Organisations want to work with aggregators, whether they’re vendors, partners, or ISVs. Red Hat is excited to partner, for example, with Microsoft in this space, because that’s what customers want.”

Analyst firm Forrester said the hybrid and cloud management solutions market is mature and growing because more developers and infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals see it as a way to address the needs of a growing multi-cloud portfolio.

According to the report, “These solutions help developers build cloud apps faster and more easily while giving I&O professionals the governance and control they need to enforce usage and cost policies.”

In the report, Forrester describes cloud computing as a key element of the business transformation agenda, driving growth in enterprise demand for, and adoption of, multiple public and private Cloud platforms.

It says, “Today, it’s unlikely that any single cloud platform (public or private) will give developers everything they want.

The report goes on to say: “A [hybrid cloud management solution] must accelerate and simplify developer access to and productivity across multiple cloud platforms at once by offering self-service consumption and application programming interfaces (APIs) for cloud app and infrastructure services.

“These capabilities remove friction, increase developer productivity, make more frequent releases possible, drive consistency across deployments, and make it easier for developers to explore new and improved services wherever they can find them.”

In the report, Forrester named Red Hat a leader in hybrid cloud management and cited Red Hat CloudForms among solutions that offer “deep and broad support for pre-built application and infrastructure templates, powerful provisioning and configuration management, role-based controls, and rich cost, performance, and capacity management features.”

McLaren said, “Red Hat’s hybrid cloud management solution is more than a developer tool. Red Hat CloudForms supports organisations to host business applications on an internal virtualised private cloud, as well as use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and OpenStack.”

It helps partners manage client infrastructure and applications across the entire infrastructure. The latest iteration, CloudForms 4, added support for Microsoft Azure and containers.

The report said, “Red Hat showed very powerful resource discovery and provisioning features, one of the most intuitive yet feature-rich admin portals, fine-grained role-based controls, and extensive APIs and external tool integrations.

“Customers liked the combination of a robust orchestration platform and fully configurable dashboards and reports, all at a low entry price.”

McLaren said, “Customers don’t really care about what elements are provided, they just want to buy the outcome. This means that partners need to rethink the outcome strategy, which is both a challenge and an opportunity.”