Category: Cloud Computing

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Cloud Computing

Public PaaS doesn’t fire: The German market sends cloudControl into exile in the United States

Docker Inc. severs its platform as a service (PaaS) problem child dotCloud and sells it to cloudControl Inc., the US subsidiary of cloudControl GmbH from Berlin, Germany.

At present, Docker focuses on making noise. The container technology stands for the future of modern applications and multi-cloud deployments and is supported by many big names including Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. Founded in 2010 as dotCloud Inc., the company developed the first polyglot PaaS. As part of the further development, Docker was created and later released in March 2013. In October 2013, the company was renamed Docker Inc. to fully concentrate on developing the Docker technology.

With about 500 customers within four years one shouldn’t speak about a dotCloud success story, which belongs to bigger competitors like Heroku (now part of Salesforce), EngineYard, Microsoft Azure or the Google App Engine. After the terrific success of the Docker container it was therefore a wise strategic step to focus on further development and find an exit for the PaaS business. In cloudControl, a grateful buyer has been found.

cloudControl to focus on the US market

cloudControl is the very first – and until today one of the very few – public PaaS provider in Germany. Founded in 2009, the Berlin based company sets on Amazon Web Services (EU region, Ireland) as its infrastructure foundation. The company positioned itself as a rock-solid European PaaS provider. Over the five years on the market cloudControl has managed to feed 20 employees, register 50,000 developers on its platform, and acquire 500 paying customers. It generated 1.45 million EUR in 2013. [1] Thus, an average customer spends around 240 EUR per month. For a German public cloud provider this is a considerable amount; yet, it is not possible to replicate this across the international arena.

Even if cloudControl has been technically developed from a pure PHP-PaaS to a polyglot platform with a stable ecosystem during the course of recent years, the revenue exemplifies the stagnant situation of Public PaaS in Germany. The Berlin-based company already recognized this in July 2013 by launching the so-called “Application Lifecycle Engine”. This is an extraction of the technical foundation of their PaaS platform. The engine can be used by enterprises to build a private PaaS or by Hosting providers for white-label PaaS solutions.

This idea could do little for the general increase of the popularity level of cloudControl. According to a study by Crisp Research with 83 German ISVs surveyed, the experience and use compared to other PaaS providers on the market are relatively low. And this, despite cloudControl being the only significant public PaaS provider in Germany.

With the acquisition of dotCloud, cloudControl “flees” to the US market to start its second attempt. The number of customers has doubled to 1000. All dotCloud employees will stay with Docker. For now, the dotCloud technology will not be touched and will be integrated into the cloudControl platform over time. This is to ensure that the existing dotCloud customers remain loyal to the platform.

Public PaaS has a minor importance in Germany

The cloudControl dilemma reflects the fundamental attitude against the public cloud in Germany. Even the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market struggles. Spending of 210m EUR on IaaS and a 38 percent usage of public cloud services in 2013 say enough.

The statements of those polled ISVs in the study draw a clear picture. Asked for the most favored operations model for using PaaS services as part of the development processes, “only” 21 percent supported the public cloud model, while 12 percent would decide for internal operations as part of a private PaaS platform. The majority of more than 60 percent would use PaaS services for development & testing as part of a hosting model.

Regarding application operations, the polled ISVs are even more ambitious. Only 11 percent would endorse operations in a public cloud environment. The majority (38 percent) see Hosted PaaS as a favored operations model to run applications in the cloud. A further 30 percent would select the more dedicated alternative (“Hosted Private PaaS”) as their preferred model. Over one-fifth of the polled ISVs would operate their applications in a private PaaS environment.

Germany is a tough market

To give cloudControl the solitary blame for its difficult situation is too easy. In fact, the entire situation of the German market, especially on the cloud topic, can be held accountable. The subsidiaries of the US flagship cloud provider also have to deal with this every day. However, there are five main reasons for cloudControl’s slow gain of momentum in Germany so far:

  • cloudControl was on the market very early. Moreover, as a startup the company needed to deal with the mammoth task to promote the topic cloud and PaaS in the innovation-unfriendly Germany.
  • The actual market growth for PaaS and cloud in general in Germany is still to come.
  • The German market and cloud have a complicated relationship and (especially) public cloud services face a tough act with the decision makers.
  • Platform as a service has a very high need of explanation.
  • cloudControl is a typical developer company, where only a little weight was placed on marketing and PR to increase the level of awareness.

For cloudControl, the acquisition of dotCloud definitely makes sense and is a purchase at eye level. Both companies are showing the same technological DNA. However, the challenge for cloudControl will be the integration of the platforms and the processes, especially when it comes down to the migration of the existing dotCloud customers and their applications, respectively, in order not to lose anyone.

The dotCloud acquisition enables cloudControl for immediate growth of the customer base and gives the Berlin based company an entry to the US PaaS market. Even if cloudControl gets into the ring with the same dotCloud competitors Heroku, EngineYard etc., the US market entry must be seen as an opportunity. Eventually, the total market offers enough space for more than one PaaS provider. And maybe in the near future cloudControl can say: „So Long Germany, and Thanks for All the Fish“. The company would deserve it.

[1] http://www.wiwo.de/erfolg/gruender/startup-der-woche-cloudcontrol-verdoppelt-sein-geschaeft/10280388.html

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Cloud Computing

Analyst Comment: The importance of cloud marketplaces (Video)

Cloud marketplaces gain in importance. Like a webshop they bundle software and services of several providers. Why the screening by a marketplace operator is an advantage and what must be improved in the future is discussed in this video.

Continue reading “Analyst Comment: The importance of cloud marketplaces (Video)”
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Cloud Computing

The OpenStack appeal continues to rise

For many CIOs and cloud strategists the open cloud management framework OpenStack still counts as a pure marketing engine. But this perception is deceiving. With the “Icehouse” release and the serious support of big IT vendors the open source project is evolving into a leading cloud standard.

The OpenStack momentum continues to build

OpenStack can be used in several different scenarios as an infrastructure foundation for public, private and hybrid clouds. Crisp Research sees “Icehouse” as an important step for the OpenStack community to increase its appeal and to help users on their journey of running their own OpenStack based cloud. To be successful with OpenStack, it is important for CIOs to find the right mix of products, services and resources in the community.

The numbers of the recent “OpenStack Summit” are an indicator for the building OpenStack momentum. More than 4,000 attendees testify to the growing importance of the open source cloud infrastructure software. It is the same with the current OpenStack deployments. In comparison to Q1/2014, the worldwide projects increased by 60 percent in Q2/2014.

On-premise private cloud deployments are still in the lead. There were 55 private cloud deployments in Q1/2014 and 85 deployments in Q2/2014. Even the number of worldwide OpenStack public clouds has jumped, from 17 to 29.

Icehouse is a milestone

After a perceived hype, OpenStack is on a good way to become one of the important cloud standards for private and hybrid cloud environments alongside Microsoft’s Cloud OS. The commitments and investments of almost all big technology vendors imply a clear future development. The new “Icehouse” release is a milestone regarding stability and functionality, and former bugs have been fixed.

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* The numbers base on the official statistics of the OpenStack Foundation.

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Cloud Computing

Amazon AWS builds a data center in Germany: Nice idea!

The Amazon Web Services will open a new cloud region targeting the German market by establishing a data center in Germany (Frankfurt). But is this so exciting for German companies?

Amazon AWS to touch down in Germany

Apparently, Amazon AWS has recognized the importance of the German market and the concerns of German companies. Crisp Research knows from reliable sources that the cloud provider will open a cloud region for the German market with a location in Frankfurt in the coming weeks.

After the announcement of Salesforce of a German data center location, Amazon is the next big U.S. cloud provider to follow the trend. This again shows the attractiveness of Germany. After all, most American companies treat the German market rather stepmotherly. Typically, the majority of American cloud providers supply the European market through data centers in Ireland (Dublin) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam). This reduces the attractiveness of cloud providers, especially in the case of medium-sized German businesses. Consultations with IT users consistently show that storing data outside of Germany and an agreement that is based on maximum European law are a no-go.

[Update]: Technical evidence

On the 4th of July 2014 German blogger Nils Jünemann published an article technically referencing on a new AWS region “eu-central-1”. Using a traceroute to “ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com” he proved, that something is available. However, when I traceroute ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com on the 5th of July 2014 the host was unknown.

AWS Portfolio: Slowly reaching the enterprise IT

In addition to the data center site, Amazon has announced AWS CloudTrail last year, the first service to allow companies more control over compliance. AWS CloudTrail helps you monitor and record the AWS API calls to one or more accounts. Here views from the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), from your own applications or third party applications are taken into account. The collected data are stored on either Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier for evaluation and can be viewed on tools from AWS or external providers. Amazon CloudTrail can be used free of charge. However, costs are associated with storing the data on Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier as well as with Amazon SNS notifications.

AWS CloudTrail is one of the most important services for enterprise customers that Amazon has released in recent times. The collected logs support the compliance with government regulations by allowing recording of all accesses to AWS services. One can operate more successful security audits based on the log data, identifying the precise origin of vulnerabilities and unauthorized or erroneous hits on data.

Enterprise quo vadis?

After establishing itself as a leading infrastructure provider and enabler for startups and new business models in the cloud, the company from Seattle has been trying to get one foot directly in the lucrative business environment for quite some time. However, one question remains open. Will that be enough to achieve a critical mass of German companies in order to evolve from a provider for startups and developers to a serious alternative for IT workloads for business?

Yes, under certain conditions:

  • Business related services must be launched simultaneously in all regions and not only in the U.S..
  • AWS requires a network of partners in order to reach the mass of attractive German corporate customers.
  • The localization of all information, such as white papers, how-to’s and training is critical.
  • Less self-service, more managed services and professional services, e.g. through the partner network.
  • Reducing complexity by simplifying the use of the scale-out principle.
  • Cloud Connectivity for reliable access to the services.
  • Avoidance of the service lock-in.
  • Strengthening the AWS Marketplace for easier use of scalable standard workloads and applications.
  • Consideration of hybrid cloud scenarios and strengthening of the partner Eucalyptus on the private cloud side.

Note on the Eucalyptus partnership: Nearly all Eucalyptus customers should also be AWS customers (Source: Eucalyptus). This means, conversely, that some hybrid cloud infrastructure exists between on-premise Eucalyptus infrastructure and the Amazon public cloud.

The existing question marks: Microsoft and Google

Medium-sized businesses demand from cloud providers that the data are stored in a German data center. About 75 percent consider physical data location a necessity to enforce German law more easily.

After Salesforce, IBM and Amazon are the only remaining major cloud providers who could be expected to make investments in this direction.

About Google, one can unfortunately say that nothing will happen in the near or far future. The DNA and mentality of the company in terms of data location and customer concerns differ too strongly from those of other providers.

At Microsoft, the cards are basically good. However, the Redmond company doesn’t need to play them now. Microsoft is pursuing a different strategy by using the Cloud OS Partner Network for local providers worldwide (e.g. Pironet NDH in Germany), empowering them with the so-called “Azure Pack” to offer an own Microsoft Azure based cloud infrastructure in a hosted model from a local data center.

How the trend of building local data centers will develop remains to be seen. Bottom line is, Germany and especially the location of Frankfurt, among others due to the DE-CIX, are well prepared to take additional international cloud providers. A key finding of this development is that international providers have understood the concerns and are willing to make compromises in the name of what is good for the user.

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Cloud Computing

Analyst Report: Amazon AWS vs. Microsoft Azure

After Microsoft needed to fight against vendors like Novell, Oracle, IBM or HP for on-premise market shares in the last decades, with the Amazon Web Services a new giant has been established in the public cloud, who puts out feelers to the enterprise customer. A market which predominantly is dominated by Microsoft and which reveals an enormous potential for the vendors.

Market forecasts by Crisp Research show a strong growth by 40 percent per year for the next years, whereby revenues in Germany in 2018 amounted up to 28 billion euros. This free analyst report compares the service portfolio as well as the strategy of the Amazon Web Services with that of Microsoft Azure.

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Cloud Computing

Analyst Report: OpenStack and the Enterprise adoption

The OpenStack momentum is getting bigger in Germany. The amount of requests by CIOs, who evaluate the open source based cloud management framework as an alternative to commercial solutions, distinctly raised in the last 6 month. This is verified by internal statistics from Crisp Research.

For more and more enterprises the question rises, if OpenStack is becoming an inherent part of their cloud integration strategy and thus needs to be considered during the planning and implementation of hybrid cloud infrastructures.

As part of several current research projects Crisp Research considers the question of whether OpenStack is already enterprise ready and which obstacles needs to be overcome to become a enterprise-grade cloud management platform. In this free analyst report a summary of the development, the components and the current deployment scenarios is given.

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Cloud Computing

Diversification? Microsoft’s Cloud OS Partner Network mutates to an “OpenStack Community”

At first sight the announcement of the new Microsoft Cloud OS Partner Network sounds indeed interesting. Who doesn’t want to use the Microsoft public cloud directly, as of now can select from one of several partner to access the Microsoft technologies indirectly. It is also possible to span a hybrid cloud between the Microsoft cloud and the partner clouds or the own data center. For Microsoft and its technological extension within the cloud it is indeed a clever move. But for the so-called „Cloud OS Partner Network“ this activity could backfire.

Microsoft Cloud OS Partner Network

The Cloud OS Partner Network consists of more than 25 cloud service provider worldwide, which, according to Microsoft, focuses especially on hybrid cloud scenarios based on Microsoft’s cloud platform. For this purpose, they rely on a combination of the Windows Server with Hyper-V, System Center and the Windows Azure Pack. With that, Microsoft tries to underwrite its vision to establish its Cloud OS as a basis for customer data center, service provider clouds and the Microsoft public cloud.

For this reason, the Cloud OS Partner Network serves more than 90 different markets with a total customer base of three million companies worldwide. Overall 2.4 million server and more than 425 data center build the technological base.

Among others the partner network includes provider like T-Systems, Fujitsu, Dimension Data, CSC and Capgemini.

Advantages for Microsoft and the customer: Locality and extension

For Microsoft, the Cloud OS Partner Network is a clever move to, measured by the distribution of Microsoft cloud technologies, gains more worldwide market share. In addition, it fits perfectly into Microsoft’s proven strategy to serve the customer not directly but over a network of partner.

The partner network also comes towards the customer. Companies who avoided the Microsoft public cloud (Windows Azure), due to data locality reasons or local policies like data privacy, are now able to find a provider in their own country and do not have to dispense with the desired technologies. For Microsoft, another advantage is the fact, not coercively to build a data center in each country, but to concentrate on the existing or the strategically important once.

With that, Microsoft can lean back a little and let again make a partner network do the uncomfortable sales. The incomes come, as before the age of the cloud, over selling licenses to the partner.

Downside for the partner: Diversification

You can find great stories about this partner network. But the fact is, with the Cloud OS Partner Network, Microsoft creates a similar competitive situation you can find in the OpenStack Community. Especially in the public cloud, with Rackspace and HP, there exist just two „top provider“, who only play a minor part in the worldwide cloud circus. Notably HP fights more with itself and is therefore not able to concentrate on innovations. However, the main problem of both and all the other providers is that they are not able to differentiate from each other. Instead, most of the providers stand in a direct competition to each other and currently not diverge significantly. This is due to the fact, that all set on the same technological base. An analysis on the current situation of the OpenStack community can be found under “Caught in a gilded cage. OpenStack provider are trapped.”

The situation for the Cloud OS Partner Network is even more uncomfortable. Unlike in OpenStack, Microsoft is the only technology supplier and decides where it is going on. The partner network need to swallow what is set before them and just can adapt further technology stacks which lead to more overhead and thus further cost for development and operations.

Except for the local markets, all Cloud OS service provider are in a direct competition and based solely on Microsoft technologies are not able to differentiate otherwise. Good support and professional services are extremely important and an advantage but no USP in the cloud.

If the Cloud OS Partner Network flops, Microsoft will get away with a black eye. The great harm the partners will carry home.

Technology as a competitive advantage

Looking at the real successful cloud provider on the market it becomes clear that those who have developed their clouds based on an own technology stack and therefore differentiate technological from the rest. These are Amazon, Google or Microsoft and precisely not Rackspace or HP who both set on OpenStack.

This, Cloud OS partner like Dimension Data, CSC or Capgemini should keep in mind. In particular CSC and Dimension Data have big claims to have a say in the cloud.

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Cloud Computing

HP Cloud Portfolio: Overview & Analysis

HP’s cloud portfolio consists of a range of cloud-based solutions and services. The HP Public Cloud is a true infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering and the current core product, which is marketed generous. The HP Enterprise Services – Virtual Private Cloud provides a hosted Private Cloud from HP. The Public Cloud services are delivered exclusively from the US with data centers in the west and east. Even if HPs sales force is distributed around the world English is the only supported language.

Portfolio

The IaaS core offering includes compute power (HP Cloud Compute), storage (HP Cloud Storage) and network capacity. Furthermore, the value-added services HP Cloud Load Balancer, HP Cloud Relational DB, HP Cloud DNS, HP Cloud Messaging, HP Cloud CDN, HP Cloud Object Storage, HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Monitoring are available with which a virtual infrastructure for own applications and services can be build.

The HP Cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack and is multi-tenant. The virtual machines are virtualized with KVM and can be booked in fixed sizes (Extra Small to Double Extra Large) per hour. The local storage of a virtual machine is not persistent. Long-term data can be stored and connected on an independent block storage. Own virtual machine images cannot be uploaded to the cloud. The load balancer is currently still in a private beta. The infrastructure is a multi-fault domain, which is considered by the service level agreement. A multi-factor authorization is currently not offered.

The HP Enterprise Cloud Services offer a variety of solutions geared to business. Including recovery-as-a-service, Dedicated Private Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud. The application services include solutions for collaboration, messaging, mobility and unified communications. Specific business applications include HP Enterprise Cloud Services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, HP Enterprise Cloud Services for Oracle and HP Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP. Professional services complement the Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio. The Enterprise Cloud Services – Virtual Private Cloud is a multi-tenant and by HP hosted Private Cloud and is aimed at SAP, Oracle and other enterprise applications.

Analysis

HP has a lot of experience in building and operating IT infrastructures and achieve the same objectives in the areas of Public and Private Cloud infrastructures. For this HP depends on own hardware components and an extensive partner network. HP has a global sales force and an equally high marketing budget and is therefore able to reach a variety of customers. Even if the data center for the Public Cloud are exclusively in the US.

In recent years HP has invested much effort and development. Nevertheless, the HP Public Cloud compute service is only available to the general public since December 2012. Due to this, HP has no significant track record for its Public Cloud. There is only a limited interoperability between the HP Public Cloud based on OpenStack, and the Private Cloud (HP CloudSystem, HP Converged Cloud) based on HP Cloud OS. Since the HP Public Cloud does not have the ability to upload own virtual machine images on the basis of a self-service, customers currently cannot transfer workloads from the Private Cloud to the Public Cloud. Even if the Private Cloud is based on OpenStack.

INSIGHTS Report

The INSIGHTS Report “HP Cloud Portfolio – Overview & Analysis” can be downloaded for free as a PDF.

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Cloud Computing

Cloud PR Disaster: Google’s light-heartedness destroys trust.

It is common in companies that only certain spokesperson are chosen that may speak in public about the company. And it is tragic when favored few to make statements leading to question marks and uncertainty. Google has entered the second time within a short time in such a faux pas. After Cloud Platform Manager Greg DeMichillie peculiar had commented the long-term availability of the Google Compute Engine, Google CIO Ben Fried commented on Google’s own use of the cloud.

We’re the good guys – the others are evil

In an interview with AllThingsD Google CIO Ben Fried talked about the dealing of Google with bring your own device and the use of external cloud services. As any IT manager may have noticed, for quite some time Google promotes its Google Apps for Business solution by hook or by crook. The more surprising is the statement of Friedman regarding the use of Dropbox, Google strictly prohibits for internal purposes.

“The important thing to understand about Dropbox,” […] “is that when your users use it in a corporate context, your corporate data is being held in someone else’s data center.”

Right, if I do not save my data on my own servers, but with Dropbox, then they are probably in a foreign data center. To be more accurate in case of Dropbox on Amazon S3. This applies also for the case if I store my data on Google Drive, Google Apps, or Google Cloud Platform. Then the data is located at? Right, Google. This the cloud model brings along.

Fried, of course, as already DeMichillie, didn’t mean it like that and corrected himself by e-mail, via AllThingsD.

Fried says he meant that the real concern about Dropbox and other apps is more around security than storage. “Any third-party cloud providers that our employees use must pass our thorough security review and agree under contract to maintain certain security levels,”

So, Fried was actually talking about the security of Dropbox and other cloud services, and not the location.

Google is a big kid

I’m not sure what to make of Google. But one thing is clear, professional corporate communication looks different. The same applies to building trust among corporate customers. Google is undoubtedly an innovative company, if not the world’s most innovative company. This light-heartedness of a child, Google and its employees need to continually develop new and interesting ideas and technologies, is also the greatest weakness. It is this degree of naivety in the external communications, which will make it difficult for Google in the future when there’s nothing fundamentally changed. At least when it comes to have a say in the matter within the sensitive market for corporate customers. The major players, most notably Microsoft, VMware, IBM, HP and Oracle know what businesses need to hear in order to appear attractive. And this not includes the statements of a Greg DeMichillie or Ben Fried.

Another interesting comment on Ben Kepes Forbes’ article “Google Shoots Itself In The Foot. Again“.

“[…]Do you really think that Google management really cares about cloud app business or its customer base? Somebody at Google said that they have the capacity they built for themselves and they have the engineering talent so why not sell it. So Brin and Page shoke their heads and they was the last they ever wanted to hear about it. There is nothing exciting about this business, they do not want the responsibilites that come with this client base and they really don’t care. I bet they shut it down.“

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Cloud Computing

Multi-Cloud is “The New Normal”

Not least the disaster of Nirvanix had shown that one should not rely on a single cloud provider. But regardless of spreading the risk, the usage of a multi-cloud strategy is a recommended approach which already is conscious or unconscious practionzed.

Hybrid or multi-cloud?

What actually means multi-cloud? Or what is the difference to a hybrid cloud? Well, by definition a hybrid cloud connects a private cloud or an on-premise IT infrastructure with a public cloud to supply the local infrastructure with further resources on-demand. This resources could be compute power, storage but even services or software. Is a local email system integrated with a SaaS CRM system it can spoken about a hybrid cloud. That means a hybrid cloud stands not just for IaaS or PaaS scenarios.

The multi-cloud approach extends the hybrid cloud idea by the amount of connected clouds. Exactly spoken, this can be n-clouds which are integrated in some kind of forms. Here, for example, cloud infrastructures are connected that applications can use different infrastructures or services in parallel or depending on the workload or the current price. Even the parallel or distributed storage of data over multiple clouds is imaginable to ensure the availability and redundance of the data. At the moment multi-cloud is intensively discussed in the IaaS area. Therefore taking a look on Ben Kepes‘ and Paul Miller’s Mapping Session on multi-cloud as well as Paul’s Sector RoadMap: Multicloud management in 2013 is recommendable.

What is often neglected, multi-cloud has a special importance in the SaaS area. The amount of new SaaS applications is growing from day to day and with that the demand to integrate this varying solutions and let exchange the data. Today, the cloud market moves uncontrolled into the direction of isolated applications while each solution offers an added value, but in the result leads to many small data silos. With this kind of progress enterprises already fought vainly in pre cloud times.

Spread the risk

Even if the cloud marketing always promise the availability and security of data, systems and applications, the responsibilty to ensure this lies in the own hands (This refers to an IaaS public cloud.). Although cloud vendor mostly provide ways and means using IaaS, the customer has to do things on its own. Outages known from the Amazon Web Services or unpredictable closures like Nirvanix should lead to more sensitivity while using cloud services. The risk needs to be spread consciously. Here not all eggs shut be put into one basked but strategically distributed over severall.

Best-of-Breed

The best-of-breed strategy is the most widespread approach within IT enterprise architectures. Here multiple integrated industry solution for various sections within a company are used. The idea behind best-of-breed is to use the best solution in each case, an all-in-one solution usually cannot offer. This means one assembled the best services and applications for its purpose. Following this approach in the cloud, one is already in a multi-cloud scenario what means that approxiamtely 90 percent of all companies using cloud services are multi-cloud users. If the used cloud services are integrated remains doubtful.

Which is recommended on the one hand, is on the other side unavoidable in many cases. Although there are already a few good all-in-one solutions on the market. Nevertheless, most pearls are implemented independently, and must be combined with other solutions, for example email and office /collaboration with CRM and ERP. In respect of the risk this has its advantage, especially in the cloud. If a provider fails only a partial service is not available and not the overall productivity environment.

Avoid data silos: APIs and integration

Such best-of-breed approaches cloud marketplaces attempt to create, by grouping individual cloud solutions into different categories to offer companies a broad portfolio of different solutions, with which a cloud productivity suite can be put together.

Nevertheless, very highly controlled and supposedly integrated marketplaces show a crucial point with massive integration problems. There are many individual SaaS applications that do not interact. This means that there is no common database and for example the email service can not access the data in the CRM service and vice versa. This creates, as described above, individual data silos and isolated applications within the marketplace.

This example also illustrates the biggest problem with a multi-cloud approach. The integration of the many different and usually independent operating cloud services and their interfaces to each other.

Multi-cloud is “The New Normal” in the cloud

The topic of multi-cloud is currently highly debated especially in IaaS environment to spread the risk and to take advantage of the cost and benefits of different cloud infrastructures. But even in the SaaS environment the subject must necessarily become a greater importance to avoid data silos and isolated applications in the future, to simplify the integration and to support companies in their adaptation of their best-of-breed strategy.

Notwithstanding these expectations, the multi-cloud use is already reality by companies using multiple cloud solutions from many different vendors, even if the services are not yet (fully) integrated.